‘A learned helplessness’: Why are marketers limiting themselves to just 1P?
Marketers are becoming increasingly focused on promotion at the expense of price, product and place. Why is this and what are the consequences?
Gather a bunch of marketers in a room, ask them to distill the profession down to its core fundamentals and it won’t be long until someone mentions the 4Ps of marketing. When it comes down to it a marketer will always be defined by those four things: promotion, product, price and place.
Except are they really? Marketing Week’s exclusive 2025 Career & Salary Survey found most marketers hold very little sway over the 4Ps at all. Just 34.1% of the more than 3,500 marketers who responded to our survey have influence over pricing. Fewer still are involved in discussions over distribution (32.7%) and less than half are involved in product development (48.5%), an area where most would consider the involvement of marketing to be crucial.
But there was one P where marketers still hold great power – the P of promotion. Nearly nine tenths of the total sample (88.7%) have control or influence over advertising and communications. This holds true across B2B (89%) and B2C (90.6%), and whether you are a SME (88.3%) or larger business (89.7%). Put simply, for most marketers it’s the 1P of marketing and very little else.
