Are the 7ps of marketing outdated? Or just misunderstood?
In short, in answer to this we don’t think it is outdated, but we do think the 7ps of marketing are misunderstood. We believe that they still offer a highly relevant strategic framework that businesses of all sizes can use to help shape their marketing strategy. However, we do think they require a modern interpretation and application in the ever-changing, customer-centric digital world.
The 7ps of marketing were an extension of the original 4ps of marketing created in the 60s. This extension was to incorporate service industry with the 7ps of marketing being: Product, Price, Place, Promotion, Physical Evidence, Process and People. We’ve worked across a wide range of sectors, companies and industries and one of the observation we’ve made over the last two decades is a lot of marketing teams get stuck on the promotion (communications) and don’t holistically look at all of the 7ps. This happens for many reasons, such as organisation structure, resource and budget constraints or not having the right skills, knowledge or experience in teams.
In this blog post we will explore what are the 7ps of marketing and how the 7ps of marketing can be applied to organisations.
The original 4ps: Shifting these for modern days
If you were to think of marketing like building a house – your 4ps of marketing are your foundation. Therefore, it is important to focus on getting them right and creating a strong foundation.
Product
Product has evolved since the concept was first developed in the 60s it now encompasses digital services and software not just physical goods. Depending on the size or structure of your organisation sometimes product doesn’t even sit within marketing. We’ve worked in organisations where product sits within operation or service delivery teams and organisations where it sits within marketing. However, even if the accountability doesn’t sit in marketing it is natural that marketing may want to influence or help shape what products look like.
Therefore, our top tip is to think about what collaborative processes exist or need to exist to enable marketing to influence and help shape new product development and product improvements. Paying particular attention to who needs to be involved in these processes, touch points, incorporating customer or market insight in to processes and highlighting decision points.
Our bonus tip is to spend the time understanding the product life cycle of your products and where they are currently sitting. This can help you to prioritise areas of focus for your 2026 marketing strategy. For example, if you have products in product decline you may want to focus efforts on refreshing the product.
Price
Getting your pricing strategy right continues to be an essential part of developing your marketing strategy. There is a greater level of transparency around pricing these days with price comparison sites and increasingly savvy customers who are willing to shop around for the right deal. Our top tip is to think about how you can encourage repeat purchase behaviour for your business through subscription options and packaging up products.
Place
Place is no longer just a physical location it is about the seamless omnichannel presence your brand has across both its digital and physical footprint. Omnichannel is about having a consistent brand it is about your brand looking, feeling and behaving in a familiar way regardless of whether it is your ecommerce website, social media or an out of home advert. This can provide a challenge for large marketing teams where silo’s or personal style might create inconsistencies. Our top tip is to ensure you have brand templates, guidelines and tone of voice that all of your staff know how to apply across a range of channels and places.
Our bonus tip is to spend the time to plot out your customer journey and understand the touchpoints (channels) where you are interacting with your customers, what they need from you and how you could improve your presence.
Promotion
Promotion is where marketers tend to be the most comfortable, but there has been a lot of change too. There is a shift from mass advertising to targeted, personalised content marketing and more recently we have seen a growth in areas like influencer marketing. One of the things we do find however, is marketers spreading themselves so thin that it starts to impact performance or expectations on the marketing team.
A wise person once said to us that a marketing strategy is as much about what you won’t do as what you will do! Our top tip is to provide your team focus you don’t have to be everywhere, but you have to be in the places that matter most. Be selective about the promotional activity you are going to focus on in the next 2-3 years, do them well before moving on to the next area.
The extended 3ps: More relevant than ever in the service economy
The next 3ps where created to extend the original 4ps of marketing to make them more applicable to a service-led economy. These are often central to delivering the original 4ps and you will start to see how interconnected these all are. Throughout our career we have spent a lot of time building new teams and capabilities within organisations and an understanding of these has really been pivotal to this.
People
This 7p of marketing is all about emphasising the critical role of employees (from all teams) in delivering the brand promise and expected customer service. This is especially important in our service-led economy. This is also where it gets tricky, as marketing aren’t going to own all elements of the customer experience, but our role is to advocate for the needs of our customers and work collaboratively with various stakeholder groups to better meet customer needs.
Our top tip is to ensure that you are all pulling together in the same direction. For example, create shared visions and objectives and take the time to make sure that everyone understands how their own personal objectives are linking into the wider team and organisation objectives. This is such an important step, but one people often skip over or don’t give enough attention, but will help strengthen your marketing team.
Our bonus tip is make sure your brand values and behaviours are embedded within your organisation. We have written about this before when we did our brand values research, but to deliver a brand promise your employees need to be able to live and breathe the brand and understand what that means in their role. We’ve previously put together some thoughts on how to embed brand values.
Process
Process is the 7p of marketing that I think is spoken about the least and we think this is just because it is the least sexy of the 7ps! You mention processes and most people switch off, but here’s the thing to deliver seamless digital processes, automation and frictionless customer onboarding you need processes. You need to understand what is currently happening, the friction points, the bottlenecks and the customer moments of truth. Once you know this you can start to implement ways to improve the customer journey, experience and ultimately your conversion and retention rate.
Our top tip is that processes aren’t developed in isolation, whether they are documented or not, we can guarantee they already exist. If you’re joining the team take the time to get to know the current processes, be curious, ask questions and before you change anything play back what you believe the as-is process are and test your understanding. Co-develop to be processes, so everyone buys in to them and most importantly don’t try to change too much at once. It is not a race, change is slow and go at the pace of your team.
Our bonus tip is to define what collaboration looks like in your team or organisation. Collaboration has become a bit of a buzzword, and it is ultimately very important. However, you often start from a point where not everyone has a common definition of collaboration and what they consider collaborative behaviour to be. A way to explore this with your team and teams you work with could be to use something like the collaboration spectrum.
This is an opener to the type of relationship teams want to have with each other and will quickly highlight any differences in opinions between teams. You can then take this further, by looking at existing processes and highlighting points of collaboration and decision points. This will help manage expectations on when people are being informed and when they are being consulted.
Physical evidence
Putting it simply physical evidence is your brand. It is about how you show up in both digital and physical locations. It goes beyond the look-and-feel and tone of your brand to how do you build trust and credibility with your customers and potential customers. This landscape is changing Gen Alpha have grown up with influencers, social proofing (reviews and testimonials) and more than ever look to their peers for validation of their choices of brands. So alongside building a consistent brand you also need to build in social proofing into your strategy. How are you going to build trust and credibility over the next 2-3 years?
Our top tip is to really focus on gathering reviews, testimonials and case studies in a variety of formats written, images, videos and scattering these throughout your marketing as drumbeat activity. Some great ways I see small businesses gather reviews is asking for feedback on receipts, onsite posters in restaurants asking customers to leave a review and follow up emails post purchase or event.
We hope that you’ve enjoyed reading this week’s blog. To reiterate we believe that 7ps of marketing provide a holistic checklist for strategic marketing management and the challenge of a marketing leader is to balance the needs of all 7ps and ensure resource is distributed across all of them and not just promotion. The framework itself isn’t outdated, but we need to refresh our understanding of what each P represents and let this evolve with technology and consumer behaviour changes.
Please do get in touch if you would like to see how Marketing Moments can help you to create your marketing strategy in 2026.
