Use product, price, place and promotion to check that a marketing plan covers more than promotion.
A marketing plan has to cover four decisions: what you sell, what you charge, how people buy and how they hear about you. Most plans only cover the last one.
Ask most business owners for their marketing plan and they will show you a posting calendar. A typical one has three posts a week, a promotion for Hari Raya and a giveaway when follower growth stalls. Everything on it is about telling people about the business. What the business sells, what it charges and how people buy usually never come up. Those decisions were often made once, years ago, or by accident, and nobody has reviewed them since.
E. Jerome McCarthy, an American marketing professor, grouped a business's marketing decisions into four words, the four Ps. The list has been taught in marketing courses for decades and still describes the whole marketing job. Product is what you sell. Price is what the customer pays. Place is where and how the customer buys. Promotion is how the customer hears about it.
The list is useful because it shows how lopsided most plans are. Promotion gets the attention because it is the part people can see, but the other three Ps decide whether promotion works at all. A well-made Instagram reel for a tuition centre cannot fix a timetable with no slots that suit working parents. A good review cannot fix a price that puts the business out of reach of the people reading the review.
Digital tools have mostly changed place and promotion. A Shopee store and a booking link are new kinds of place. Search, social media and messaging apps are new kinds of promotion, and none of them existed when the list was written. Product and price are the same decisions they always were, and no app makes them for you.
To the customer, product is everything they receive, which is more than the core item. It includes what comes with the item, the packaging, what happens when something goes wrong, and what you promise before they pay. Take a hawker stall in Ang Mo Kio selling chicken rice. The rice and chicken are much the same as at many other stalls. The product also includes the portion size, chilli packed separately for takeaway, accepting PayNow, and letting regulars order by message and pick up without queuing. To a busy office worker, those details can matter more than a small change to the recipe.
A tuition centre works the same way. Its product includes class size, the worksheets sent home, progress updates to parents and what happens if a child misses a lesson. A guarantee, such as a free make-up class, is part of the product too.
Price does two jobs. It sets expectations, and it decides who can buy. A higher price signals more care or better results. A very low price makes people wonder what is missing. Every price lets some people in and keeps others out.
Discounts need care, because a discount brings in whoever responds to discounts, and that may not be the customer you want. Say the tuition centre runs a half-price first month. The class fills, but many of the new families came for the deal. When the full fee starts, they leave to look for the next promotion. Meanwhile the parents the centre really wanted, the ones who would have stayed two years, may read the discount as a sign the centre is struggling. You can still discount. Decide who the price is for before you change it.
Place used to mean where your shop was. For most small businesses now, place means every route by which a customer can hand over money:
a walk-in counter a Shopee or Lazada store an order by WhatsApp a delivery app a booking link on your website
Each route changes who buys. If the chicken rice stall only serves walk-ins, it serves the people passing at lunchtime. If it adds pre-order by message, it can also serve the office worker who has thirty minutes for lunch and no time to queue. A home bakery that takes orders only through Instagram messages loses the customer who wanted to check a price and pay without talking to anyone.
When an owner says their marketing is not working, the problem is often place. People found the business, wanted the product, could not buy easily, and bought something nearby instead.
You do not need to rebuild your business around the four Ps. Use them as a check whenever you plan marketing. Go through each P in turn and ask two questions: what did you decide, and when did you last look at it.
Most owners answer quickly for promotion and struggle with at least one of the other three. Notice which ones you can answer easily and which ones you cannot. The weakest P is often the one nobody chose on purpose: a price copied from a competitor, a product that grew by adding whatever customers asked for, or a place that is whatever the first platform offered.
In the activity below you will run this check on a real business. Pick one you know well enough to be honest about, and notice which P you have the least to say about.
Pick a business you know, such as a tuition centre or a hawker stall. Write one line for each of the four Ps, then mark the P that gets the least thought.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).