Product is the P all marketers should strive to influence

Late last Summer I hosted Jon Evans. The System1 CMO and host of the Uncensored CMO Podcast was visiting Sydney and – as is usually the way – finding the city lovely if unremarkable.

Downtown Sydney isn’t that flash. The real magic of the Emerald City is outside the downtown area. So I intervened. I met him at Circular Quay and got him on the first ferry to Manly. God’s country. Seventeen minutes and a quick whizz past the Opera House later we were at the Three Pines drinking cold ones and staring at a Pacific Ocean so blue it hurt my eyes to look at it.

We laughed. Drank. Had a meal. Changed into our swimmers. And floated forty feet out from an idyllic sandy bay making marketing plans.

The only one that survived the evening was a commitment to review the 10 greatest beer ads of all time, while drinking the beers in question. In a pub. And, sure enough, on a cold London afternoon a year later I met Jon and his production team in the basement of the Dog and Biscuit. Jon’s long-suffering producer had set up 10 pints of the various beverages and before you could say “possibly not a good idea” someone pressed a red button and we were off.

An interesting thing happened towards the end. My beer consumption slowed. I was only half-way through my pint of the black stuff when we completed our discussion on the second placed ad for Guinness. Up next, the number one – the Heineken ad featuring Daniel Craig. One of the best directed, funniest long form ads I have ever seen. Off screen the producer approached with my Heineken.

“It’s ok,” I said, motioning to my Guinness. “I’ll stick with this”.

Partly because I was pissed, but also struck by my sudden reticence, I started to ponder. We had spent an hour talking about advertising. Watching ads. And we were about to see the beer ad that had tested best of all. With James Bond. And despite all that, my hand squeezed tight around my cold, black friend.

I did that not because of the delightful Guinness ad I had just seen. Or some deep-seated emotional connection to the brand or a need to project myself as a “Guinness drinker”. Or because of any lack of love for Heineken – a fine pint I have enjoyed on numerous occasions. I did it because I was really enjoying my pint. You can see me on the video, pleasantly shitfaced, having this exact thought while Jon bangs on about Heineken about 47 minutes in.

Lessons from the black stuff

Here we were, discussing the best in beer advertising. And product was still winning the day. And that was not just down to the inherent fantasticness of Guinness the great stout. But all the work that Diageo has put into making it such a consistently well served pint everywhere on the planet. When I was a young man we would travel far and wide for a “good pint of Guinness”. It was not uncommon to have long, pissed up debates about where the ”good” stuff was. And where it wasn’t. But all of that is ancient history. Diageo has spent millions to make sure every pint of Guinness is now as good as the almost empty one I was clutching down in the basement of the Dog and Biscuit.

And the Guinness marketing team were and are part of this essential mission. Yes, they work on distinctive assets. They devise long and short promotional campaigns. Storytelling. Digital. Sponsorships. But the marketing teams across Diageo are also involved in advancing the Guinness product too. On ensuring the consistency of the pint across the bars of the world. Helping with the creation and launch of Guinness 0.0. Contributing to new product initiatives like MicroDraught.

Attempts to update the four Ps are embarrassing – they’ve endured for a reason

Note use of the word “involved” in that last paragraph. I chose it carefully. The Guinness marketing team do not run product quality or the development of 0.0. But they were a big part of it. They helped with consumer data, with positioning, with product tests and launch materials.

I point this out because I am reading more and more nonsense from that most annoying of quadrants on the two by two grid of marketers – those without any actual training in the discipline who want to lecture others how to do it. Like bad French speakers who propose alterations to improve pronunciation. Or Americans new to soccer who suggest making the goals bigger to improve the game. They drive me crazy.

This might be an incredibly uncool observation but can people actually learn marketing before they start opining about it? Or fixing it? Or suggesting changes? FFS.

I read one particularly ridiculous post last week from a delightful man with a degree in history and politics who suggested it was “pure arrogance” for marketers to suggest they manage the other Ps. They should stick to their “core job” and do growth demand and stuff.

There are a few who directly run the other Ps – but they are outliers. Most marketers don’t aspire to run distribution or product development or pricing. In fact, if you acknowledge the presence of creative and media agencies, they don’t even directly produce the promotional P either. But – while representing the consumer – they should feed into these processes for the good of the company. Forget control and think input.

Turning good to great

I chose Guinness as my exemplar carefully too. Because it’s an old established product. Too often when we talk about product we instantly default to sexy products new to the market and their titanic, culture changing launches. I say product and you think Steve Jobs with an iPhone in his hand. In truth, most of the value that marketing can offer its organisation comes long after launch. Think about the 50,000 iterations between that Jobsian moment and the current IPhone16. Running IOS 18. Point 1.

It can be found in the consumer research that only marketing teams do. In the ongoing improvements and small adaptations that come from touchpoint analysis, NPS verbatims and jobs to be done methodology. Product oriented companies launch big new things and then grandly move to the next big thing. Market oriented managers stick around after the party and start asking consumers, often for free, what would make the product better. And those incremental tweaks, over time, turn good products into great ones.

I spend my time during the product part of the Mini MBA beseeching the class not to fixate on New Product Development initiatives that they often aren’t invited to anyway, and to focus instead on Existing Product Improvement. If there is one thing I have learned from a thousand customers discussing a hundred different products it’s that the things a company thinks are small are, from a consumer perspective, big. And the grand improvements the company is spending bazillions on are probably of little significance. Finding out from the source what needs to be fixed or changed and then getting it done is the quiet product work of proper marketers. Even if all the credit eventually goes to production or the product marketing team.

Paying the price

This process starts with marketers ignoring the ignorant voices telling them marketing is now just about demand gen and performance and accepting that product is part of their job. That should then lead to marketers wanting to learn more about product improvement (along with pricing and distribution) so they can be more than just a comms person pretending to be a marketer.

What is marketing primarily responsible for in your company?	% of sample
Brand	94%
Digital marketing	93%
Advertising	91%
New products/services	26%
Pricing	20%
Distribution	13%

Source: LBS/The CMO Survey 2023 n=80

Even then marketing involvement still hinges on whether the department has the corporate remit to work on products and product improvement. The recent UK CMO Survey, conducted by London Business School in association with Christine Moorman who runs the long-running American equivalent, offers some perspective. When asked what marketing is primarily responsible for within their companies almost all the CMOs nominated brand, digital marketing and advertising – see above. But new products (26%), pricing (20%) and distribution (13%) were minority pursuits.

Before we give up the ghost and rebrand marketing as the colouring in department we should pause and note the unhelpful wording in the survey. It asks what marketing is “primarily responsible” for. To my earlier point we would not expect these proportions to be especially high. Indeed, as a marketer, I’m not even sure I want them to be any higher. Is it even a good idea to have marketing primarily running pricing or product development or distribution? Input, yes. Control, no. The survey asks the wrong question and leaves the empirical door half closed. The question should have been: “What commercial activities does marketing make a significant contribution to within your company”.

Whatever the results, it’s clear many marketers, probably most of them, are precluded from involvement in anything other than Promotion. Most British marketers aren’t marketers at all. They work in communications. Nothing wrong with that. But claiming you are a marketer while exclusively focusing on advertising and digital is a bit like suggesting I’m a chef because I occasionally get pissed with my neighbour Captain Nick and make him a sloppy pizza.

It’s clear many marketers, probably most of them, are precluded from involvement in anything other than Promotion. Most British marketers aren’t marketers at all. They work in communications.

We are paying the price for too many marketers not knowing enough about marketing and therefore defaulting to the bits they can do. We are paying the price for a generation of morons who changed the 4Ps or added inane new inputs that all, incredibly, also began with P. While doing so, Professor Jerry McCarthy’s original point – that these were the four levers that marketers could pull to impact consumers – was lost in a sea of purpose, pride, people and pants. While we were inventing new town names we lost most of the kingdom

We are also paying the price for a discipline that conflates advertising and marketing as the same thing, rather than the former being a single digit percentage of the latter. We are paying the price for gurus who say nonsensical things like “marketing is no longer about the stuff you make but about the stories you tell”. That’s bollocks Seth Godin. Bollocks.

The product P is clearly, outside of the tiny social bubble marketers inhabit, far more important than the stories we tell each other and occasionally consumers. And as marketers we should not get upset about this fact. We should celebrate it and ensure we are doing our part to move our respective products ever closer to consumer desires.

Ignore what you hear and read from untrained marketers and self-appointed gurus. You were born into an amazing discipline that has a finger in all the Ps. And chief among them is the Product. We stand or fall for the most part on its capabilities. You don’t control product. You aren’t in charge of it. But if you aren’t helping assess it, improve it and evolve it your company is losing out on massively important insights and genuinely enormous opportunities. If you wipe away the dust and the thick layer of bullshit from the side of the marketing tin the ingredients still say product.

Mark Ritson is a former marketing professor, five times PPA Columnist of the Year, and founder of the Mini MBA in Marketing, which has as much content on pricing, product development and distribution as it has on marketing communications. Imagine.