You cannot optimize every P of marketing. Win on a few.
This is my view, as Releva's CEO. The marketing mix is usually taught as a set of levers to push together. In practice a business is built around two or three of them, and pushing hard on the others can cost money or hurt the brand.
- The 4 Ps: E. Jerome McCarthy, Basic Marketing, 1960
- Today's longer list adds planning, process, people and performance
- By Georgi Georgiev, CEO of Releva
Every MBA, me included, learns the 4 Ps: product, price, placement and promotion, from E. Jerome McCarthy's 1960 book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. The modern list adds planning, process and people. I add a fourth: marketing performance. That makes eight.
The common reading treats the eight as optimizable at the same time, equally weighted and tightly interdependent. I think all three assumptions are wrong. Some Ps compete with each other, a business wins on a few of them, and the rest can drift close to zero without hurting it much.
In ecommerce, I see five Ps where more is better: process, promotion, price, placement and performance. They are what the agent works on, for each shopper, with the store's own data.
The Ps cannot all be optimized at once
Suppose you try to optimize all eight Ps because they matter equally. With just two KPIs per P, that is sixteen KPIs to move at once. Some of them will compete. Some will eat into each other.
Take three: product and price from the classic mix, people from the modern one. You want to stand out through innovation and be cheaper at the same time. What do you tell your recruiters and your engineers?
Making a product cheaper, in a deep-tech company, usually means automating whatever you can, which costs a lot up front, sourcing materials for less, sometimes at the cost of quality, hiring cheaper labour or moving operations, and cutting every cost that is not essential, which can touch the brand, hiring and even delivery. You can keep quality with careful automation and careful cuts. But differentiation through innovation needs the opposite profile: top engineers, deep in R&D and sometimes in academic work.
Everything is people's work, so say you hire both: one group to cut cost, another to innovate. Now you need them to work as one team toward one objective. The deeper you go, the more trade-offs you find. So no, the Ps are not all optimizable together, and they do not weigh the same. A company can win by optimizing a few of them.
Two restaurants, scored on eight Ps
The third assumption is that the Ps are highly interdependent. To test it, take two restaurants at opposite ends.
The first is a busy pizza place in Barcelona, right opposite the Sagrada Familia, known for big pizzas and low prices. The second is El Bulli, near the town of Roses: a restaurant in a place few people had heard of, with three Michelin stars, so in demand that it received far more requests for a table than it could ever seat. Here is how I would score each, out of five.
The eight Ps, scored for two restaurants
| P | Pizza place by the Sagrada Familia | El Bulli |
|---|---|---|
| Product | 2 | 5 |
| Price | 4 | 2 |
| Placement | 5 | 1 |
| Promotion | 1 | 1 |
| Planning | 1 | 1 |
| Process | 2 | 5 |
| People | 2 | 5 |
| Marketing performance | 1 | 1 |
Scores are Georgi Georgiev's own judgement, used to make the argument, not a measurement.
What happens when you push the wrong P
Now look at a few corner cases, the way a scientist would, and reason without the maths.
The pizza place cuts its product
Say it serves semi-finished pizzas, put in the oven for a few minutes before serving. Product drops from 2 to 0. But the Sagrada Familia is still outside the window, and I would expect it to stay as full as before. Placement drives this business. It might save on sourcing, and it will collect bad reviews for the food and a weaker brand.
El Bulli spends heavily on promotion
Say it puts millions into storytelling. It gets even more requests for a table, and it still has the same number of seats. The money buys nothing. For this business, more promotion is pure loss.
The two swap places
My guess: the pizza place, moved to an unknown village, goes bankrupt quickly. El Bulli, moved to the Sagrada Familia, pays a much higher rent for no gain. Nobody went to El Bulli for the view.
So businesses organize around a few of the Ps. Pushing harder on the ones that are not critical has a negative effect. And you can let the non-critical ones fall close to zero without changing much.
The five Ps that add up in ecommerce
In ecommerce, in my experience, five Ps are additive: the more of each, the better. They are process, promotion, price, placement and performance. That is where we built Releva.
Most of digital promotion is already run by machines. Ad platforms bid for you, judge whether your ad fits a person's interests and decide where to show it. Releva adds another machine, on the store's side, one that predicts for each shopper what they need, when they will need it, which offer, if any, makes sense for them, and which channel will reach them: email, Viber, WhatsApp, push or an ad audience on Meta or Google.
The agent uses those predictions across the whole journey (process) to show and follow up with the right products (promotion), at the right moment, with the right offer (price), in the right channel (placement). And it measures what it adds in the store's own orders, against a holdout group (performance).
It does this with first-party data the store collects with consent, and it optimizes for the shopper's experience as much as for revenue. A store does not need to win on every P. It needs to be very good at the few that compound.
Five Ps, decided per shopper
Products, offer, channel and moment, for each shopper
You set the goal and the rules. The agent decides for each shopper on every page, message and ad audience, and a holdout in your own orders shows the lift.
See how it decides →One memory, one goal, every channel
Separate tools each optimize their own number. One agent works on the few Ps that add up, toward the goal you choose.
Why one agent →Questions about the 4 Ps of marketing
What are the 4 Ps of marketing?
Product, price, placement and promotion. E. Jerome McCarthy introduced them in his 1960 book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, and they are still the foundation of most marketing courses.
What are the 8 Ps of marketing?
The 4 Ps plus planning, process and people, which are commonly added today. Georgi Georgiev adds an eighth: marketing performance.
Should a business optimize all the Ps at once?
In Georgi Georgiev's view, no. Some Ps compete with each other, a business is built around a few of them, and pushing hard on the ones that are not critical can cost money or hurt the brand.
Which Ps matter most in ecommerce?
In his experience, five are additive in ecommerce: process, promotion, price, placement and performance. The more of each, the better.
How does the agent work on those Ps?
It predicts what each shopper needs, when, which offer makes sense and which channel reaches them, then acts across the journey and measures what it added against a holdout group in the store's own orders.
See which of last week's visitors you missed
One call, with your store and ad accounts open. Then 30 days free. A holdout group decides: if the agent doesn't add orders in 30 days, you don't pay.
See it on your store
You'll talk to one of us.