TL;DR AI has changed marketing. It hasn't changed the fundamentals of how businesses grow. I've found myself coming back to the 4 Ps of marketing—Product, Price, Place, and Promotion—with a twist—more than ever because they force companies to answer the commercial questions that determine whether marketing has any chance of succeeding. Once those decisions are made, AI becomes an incredible accelerator. Without them, it simply helps companies move faster in the wrong direction. This article explains why I still use the 4 Ps with every Fractional CMO client and how I combine them with customer-centric thinking, Jobs to Be Done, and AI to build stronger commercial strategies.
If you've spent any time on LinkedIn lately, you'd think marketing has completely changed.
Every day there's another post about AI SDRs, AI content, AI agents, AI outbound, AI SEO, AI websites... you get the idea.
Don't get me wrong. I use AI every day. My clients use it. My team uses it. It's one of the biggest shifts I've seen in my career.
But I also think it's exposing a problem that's been hiding in plain sight for years.
AI has made it incredibly easy to execute.
It hasn't made companies any better at deciding what they should execute.
A few years ago, I was brought in as Fractional CMO for a life science company that had been around for more than 20 years. On the surface, they looked like they had things figured out. Large product catalog. Good reputation. Loyal customers. The kind of business most people would assume had a pretty mature commercial strategy.
Early on, I asked what I thought was a simple question.
"How do we decide what products we carry?"
The room got quiet.
Not because nobody cared. Because nobody had ever really stopped to define it.
Some products were there because customers had asked for them over the years. Others came from supplier relationships. Some had been in the catalog for so long that nobody really knew why they were there anymore. A few were added because someone inside the company thought they were interesting or thought they might sell.
Pricing wasn't much different. Every so often someone would check what competitors were charging and adjust accordingly. Promotion depended on who remembered to talk about the product after it launched.
What struck me wasn't that any of those decisions were terrible. It's that they weren't connected.
Everyone wanted to talk about marketing.
A better website.
More content.
Google Ads.
Trade shows.
Email campaigns.
Today that list would include AI-generated content, outbound agents, automated prospecting, and whatever new platform showed up in your LinkedIn feed this morning.
Almost nobody wanted to talk about the decisions that should have happened before any of that.
That's because most companies think marketing starts with promotion.
It doesn't.
Marketing starts with deciding what you're going to sell, who it's for, what it's worth, and how customers should buy it.
Promotion comes later.
That's exactly what the original 4 Ps of Marketing were designed to help companies figure out.
They've been around for more than 60 years. People love to call them outdated. Every few years someone introduces another framework with a few more letters attached to it.
I've used most of them.
Sure they're useful.
But if you dropped me into almost any company tomorrow and told me I had one framework to diagnose why growth had stalled, I'd still start with the 4 Ps.
Not because they're old.
Because they force you to answer the questions that matter most.
And in a world where AI can generate a month's worth of marketing before you've finished your first coffee, getting those answers right matters more than ever.
Why Everyone Starts with Promotion (And Why That's the Problem)
If you ask most people what marketing is, they'll usually describe promotion.
Advertising.
Social media.
SEO.
Trade shows.
Email campaigns.
Content.
PR.
Brand awareness.
Ask someone if they need help with marketing and nine times out of ten they're really asking for help getting more people to notice them.
I get it. Promotion is the visible part of marketing. It's the website everyone sees. It's the LinkedIn post that gets shared. It's the Google Ads campaign that starts generating leads. It's the podcast sponsorship, the conference booth, or the video that finally gets some traction.
It's also where AI has made the biggest splash. Today you can spin up a month of social content in an afternoon. You can build landing pages, write emails, summarize research, analyze competitors, and generate product descriptions faster than ever.
That's impressive.
But here's the problem.
Promotion amplifies whatever is already there.
If you've got the right product, for the right customer, at the right price, in the right place, good promotion accelerates growth.
If you don't, promotion just helps more people discover something they weren't going to buy anyway.
I've seen companies spend six figures on advertising without ever asking whether the product solved a meaningful customer problem. I've seen businesses obsess over Google rankings while making it incredibly difficult for customers to actually buy. I've seen leadership teams spend weeks debating the copy on a landing page while pricing decisions were based almost entirely on what the competitor down the street happened to charge.
None of those are promotion problems.
They're commercial strategy problems.
And that's why the 4 Ps have stood the test of time.
They force you to answer the questions that come before marketing tactics.
What are we selling?
Who is it really for?
What job does it help them get done?
Why should they choose us?
What should we charge?
How should customers buy?
Only after you've answered those questions does promotion become the multiplier it's supposed to be.
I tell clients all the time that marketing isn't a department. It's the commercial expression of the business. Product, sales, customer service, operations, finance, and marketing all have a hand in whether customers choose you.
Promotion just happens to be the part everyone notices.
And because it's visible, it's often the first thing companies try to fix.
It's rarely the first thing I look at.
Product: Most Companies Don't Have a Marketing Problem. They Have a Product Portfolio Problem.
One of the things I've noticed over the years is that companies almost never wake up one morning and decide to build a random product catalog. It happens slowly. A customer asks if you carry something. A supplier introduces a new line. Your sales team keeps hearing the same request. Someone internally gets excited about a new technology. Before long, you've got hundreds of products.
What you don't necessarily have is a product strategy.
That's exactly what I found with the company I mentioned earlier. They'd been in business for more than 20 years, had a solid reputation, and had built a catalog that served them well. The problem wasn't the products themselves. The problem was that nobody had ever stopped to define the role each product was supposed to play in growing the business.
That's a very different question.
Not every product should exist for the same reason. Some products attract new customers. Some generate margin. Some support larger system sales. Some create recurring revenue. Some strengthen supplier relationships. Others exist simply because customers expect you to carry them.
When every product gets treated the same, the catalog slowly becomes a warehouse instead of a strategy.
That's where we started. Instead of evaluating products one at a time, we stepped back and looked at the portfolio as a whole. We grouped products by the job they were supposed to do for the business: commodity products, exclusive distribution products, internally developed products, strategic products that differentiated the company, and products that helped customers buy complete systems instead of individual components.
Almost overnight, the conversations changed.
Instead of asking, "Should we add this product?" we started asking, "What role would this product play?" If nobody could answer that question, it probably didn't belong in the catalog. That's a much healthier way to make product decisions because it forces you to think about where the business is going, not just what's available to sell.
Product Starts With the Customer, Not the Product
This is where I think a lot of companies get themselves into trouble. They spend months talking about features while their customers spend about thirty seconds deciding whether the product can solve the problem they're trying to solve. Those are two very different conversations.
I've spent most of my career working with companies in life sciences, healthcare, medtech, advanced manufacturing, and other technically complex industries. Almost every one of them starts by talking about the product. Their customers almost always start by talking about the work they're trying to get done.
A researcher isn't looking for another piece of equipment. They're trying to make their experiments more repeatable. A lab manager isn't shopping for a vaporizer. They're trying to reduce downtime before the next study begins. A founder isn't looking for a Fractional CMO. They're trying to figure out why growth has stalled without hiring another full-time executive.
That's why I'm such a believer in Jobs to Be Done.
Customers don't buy products because they have more features. They hire products to help them make progress. Once you understand the progress they're trying to make, the rest of the marketing mix becomes much easier. Pricing makes more sense. Positioning gets sharper. Promotion becomes more compelling because you're talking about outcomes instead of specifications.
Even AI gets better. You're giving it a clear strategy to execute instead of asking it to invent one.
Questions I Ask Every Leadership Team
Whenever I start working with a new client, I ask some version of the same questions. Not because they're marketing questions, but because they're business questions.
Why does this product exist?
Who is it really for?
What problem does it solve better than the alternatives?
Where does it fit within the rest of your portfolio?
Would customers notice if it disappeared tomorrow?
What role does it play in your long-term strategy?
Does it deserve more investment or less?
Are you carrying it because customers need it, or because you've always carried it?
Those questions sound simple, but they're surprisingly difficult to answer. If your leadership team can answer them consistently, you've already done something most companies haven't.
You've stopped managing products and started managing a portfolio.
Price: Stop Letting Your Competitors Decide What You're Worth
I think pricing is one of the most misunderstood parts of marketing.
Ask most companies how they price their products and you'll hear some version of the same answer.
"We keep an eye on the competition."
There's nothing wrong with understanding what competitors charge. You absolutely should know your market. The problem is when competitive pricing becomes your entire pricing strategy.
That's exactly what I found with this client.
Every so often someone would look at competitor pricing, make a few adjustments, and we'd move on. There wasn't a consistent way to think about profitability, customer value, or even why one product should command a premium while another should be priced aggressively.
Pricing had become reactive instead of strategic.
Once we'd defined the different roles products played in the portfolio, pricing became much easier to talk about. A commodity product shouldn't necessarily be priced the same way as an exclusive distribution product. A proprietary product you've invested years developing shouldn't be evaluated the same way as something ten competitors can sell tomorrow.
Those products create different kinds of value, which means they deserve different pricing conversations.
Just because two products look similar doesn't mean customers value them the same way.
Think about the last time you bought software.
There was probably a cheaper alternative.
You didn't buy based on price alone. You bought because one solution looked easier to implement, came with better support, reduced risk, integrated with the rest of your systems, or simply gave you more confidence that you'd be successful.
That's value.
The same thing happens in healthcare, life sciences, manufacturing, and almost every complex B2B market I work in.
Customers aren't buying a box.
They're buying confidence.
They're buying reliability.
They're buying expertise.
Sometimes they're buying the ability to sleep better the night before an audit.
Price is simply one expression of that value.
That doesn't mean you should ignore your competitors. It means they should be one input—not the strategy.
The better questions are:
What outcome does this product create for the customer?
How important is that outcome?
How difficult would it be to replace us?
What level of support are we providing?
What does this product contribute to the rest of the relationship?
Does our pricing reflect the value we actually create?
Those questions produce much better pricing decisions than, "Acme charges $495, so let's charge $489."
There's another benefit most companies miss.
Good pricing helps customers understand your business.
If every product is priced using a different philosophy, customers start wondering what they're really paying for. If pricing reflects the role each product plays, your catalog starts making sense.
Customers may never notice that consciously.
But they'll feel it.
See… when they trust your pricing, they're much more likely to trust other things.
Place: Stop Thinking About Where You Sell. Start Thinking About How Customers Buy.
The original definition of Place was simple: where can customers buy your product?
Today, it's much bigger than that.
Place is every step between a customer realizing they have a problem and becoming a customer. It's how they discover you, evaluate their options, build confidence, make a purchase, and decide whether they'd buy from you again.
One of the first things I look at with a new client is how customers actually buy. Not how leadership thinks they buy. Not how sales wishes they bought. How they really buy.
Customers don't wake up thinking, "I'm going to buy from Company X today." They wake up with a problem.
They start looking for answers.
That journey might start with Google. It might start with ChatGPT or Claude. It might be a conversation with a colleague, a recommendation at a conference, or a supplier they already trust. However they get there, they're trying to answer the same question:
"Who can help me solve this problem?"
That's why I don't think Place is only about channels anymore.
It's about reducing friction.
Make It Easier to Buy
One of the biggest opportunities I see is companies working incredibly hard to generate leads while making it surprisingly difficult for those leads to become customers.
We've all landed on a website looking for a quick answer and left frustrated. The pricing isn't there. The documentation is buried. It's impossible to compare products. You're not even sure you've found the right solution before you're asked to "Contact Sales."
Sometimes that's appropriate. Most of the time, it's unnecessary friction.
Customers don't usually want to talk to sales first. They want enough information to decide whether talking to sales is worth their time.
AI Is Changing Discovery, Not Why People Buy
I don't think AI is changing why people buy.
People still want confidence. They still compare options. They still look for proof, ask colleagues, and worry about making the wrong decision.
What AI’s changing is how quickly they can find answers.
That's why customer-centric companies are in such a strong position. They're not creating content because Google wants fresh content. They're creating useful answers because customers have real questions. Whether those answers are found through Google, ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever comes next almost doesn't matter.
If you're genuinely helping customers solve problems, they'll find you.
We Didn't Add More Channels. We Removed Friction.
With the client I mentioned earlier, improving Place didn't mean adding another sales channel. It meant making the buying experience easier.
We reorganized the catalog around how customers thought about solutions instead of how the company thought about products. We improved navigation, connected related products, expanded what customers could do online, and made it easier to find the information they needed before contacting sales.
None of those changes were flashy. Most customers probably never noticed them.
They just found what they needed faster.
Sometimes the best improvements are the ones customers never think about because nothing got in their way.
Promotion: It's the Part Everyone Sees
If there's one reason the 4 Ps get misunderstood, it's because Promotion is the only one customers ever really notice.
Nobody compliments you on your pricing strategy.
Nobody calls because they noticed how thoughtfully you built your product portfolio.
Nobody says, "I really appreciated how easy it was to buy from you."
They notice the website. The ad. The trade show booth. The LinkedIn post. The podcast. The email that landed in their inbox that morning.
So it's not surprising that when growth slows down, promotion is usually the first thing companies want to fix.
I can't tell you how many conversations I've had that started with, "We need better marketing."
Sometimes they're right.
Sometimes what they really need is a better product strategy. Or pricing that's based on value instead of whatever the competitor down the street happens to charge. Or a buying experience that doesn't make customers work so hard just to figure out if they're in the right place.
Marketing gets blamed for a lot of problems it didn't create.
AI has only made that easier.
Today you can build a month's worth of content before lunch. You can generate emails, ads, blog posts, landing pages, sales decks, and social content in a fraction of the time it took a year ago. That's incredible, and I'm all for it. I use AI every day.
What AI can't do is decide whether you're saying something worth hearing.
I've seen companies publish more content in six months than they produced in the previous five years. It looked productive. The analytics looked busy. But when you stepped back and asked whether customers understood the company's value any better, the answer was usually no.
More activity isn't the same as more progress.
That's true whether you're using AI or not.
When we finished reorganizing the product portfolio for the client I mentioned earlier, promotion became surprisingly straightforward. We knew which products deserved a full launch and which just needed a product page. We knew which ones supported bigger strategic goals and which were simply expected parts of the catalog. We stopped treating every product like it deserved the same amount of attention because customers didn't value every product the same way.
That's really what good promotion does.
It shines a brighter light on the things that matter most.
It doesn't create value.
It reveals it.
And I think that's the biggest mistake companies make today. They expect promotion to compensate for weak decisions everywhere else in the business. Sometimes it works for a little while. Usually it doesn't. Eventually the market catches up, because customers are remarkably good at separating companies that communicate well from companies that actually solve their problems.
That's why I still start with the first three Ps.
Promotion is incredibly important.
It just shouldn't be first.
The 4 Ps Weren't Wrong. People Just Stopped Using Them.
Over the years, marketers have added more letters.
The 5 Ps.
The 7 Ps.
The 4 Cs.
The 7 Cs.
Most of them bring something useful to the conversation. The 4 Cs, for example, do a much better job of forcing us to think from the customer's perspective instead of our own. I use that thinking all the time. So do concepts like Jobs to Be Done, customer-centricity, outcome-driven marketing, and even frameworks like the Challenger Sale.
I don't see any of them as replacements for the 4 Ps.
I see them as extensions.
The 4 Ps give you a way to think about building a commercial strategy. Customer-centricity reminds you that your opinion doesn't matter nearly as much as your customer's reality. Jobs to Be Done helps you understand the progress customers are trying to make. Challenger helps sales have better commercial conversations. AI helps you execute faster.
They're solving different problems.
The mistake I see companies make is treating each framework like it's the answer.
It isn't.
Every framework has blind spots.
That's why I don't walk into a client with one playbook. I borrow from a lot of places. Some of the thinking comes from classic marketing. Some comes from customer research. Some comes from sales. Some comes from product strategy. Some comes from years of watching companies succeed—and fail—in highly technical industries.
The trick is knowing when to use each framework.
That's one of the reasons I've spent the last several years developing my own commercialization approach. It doesn't replace these frameworks. It gives them a place to work together. Marketing, sales, product, customer experience, AI, and commercial strategy shouldn't operate as separate conversations. They're all part of the same system.
That's a much bigger discussion for another article.
For now, if you take nothing else away from this one, remember this:
The 4 Ps aren't old.
They're foundational.
The companies growing the fastest today aren't ignoring them because AI showed up. They're using them to make better commercial decisions, then using AI to execute those decisions faster and more consistently.
That's a big difference.
Anyone can generate more content.
Anyone can launch another campaign.
The companies that win over the next decade won't be the ones producing the most marketing.
They'll be the ones making the best commercial decisions before they ever ask AI to write the first prompt.
4Ps of Marketing Questions to Ask Before You Launch Your Next Marketing Campaign...
Ask yourself four questions.
Are we selling the right products?
Are we pricing them based on value, not habit?
Have we made it genuinely easy for customers to buy?
Are we promoting the things that matter most?
If you can't confidently answer those four questions, don't start by buying another AI tool or launching another campaign.
Start there.
The rest gets a whole lot easier.
