1960. The 4 Ps of marketing are published

The moment

Homewood, Illinois, 1960. The textbook publisher Richard D. Irwin brings out a 770-page volume by E. Jerome McCarthy called Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach [1]. Inside, everything a marketing manager has to decide is sorted into four boxes that share a first letter: product, place, promotion, price.

The same summer, in Boston, the July to August issue of Harvard Business Review carries “Marketing Myopia” by Theodore Levitt, a lecturer in his second year at the Harvard Business School [2]. It opens by telling the railroads they were never in the railroad business. One book gives marketing a framework. One article gives it a question. Between them, the subject becomes something you can teach, examine, and be hired to run.

What came before

The idea McCarthy compressed was already in the room. In 1948 James Culliton, in a Harvard research bulletin on manufacturers’ marketing costs, had described the marketing executive as a “mixer of ingredients”. His colleague Neil Borden built the term “marketing mix” on it, taught it for some fifteen years, and only wrote it up in 1964, by which time his list of ingredients ran to twelve, from product planning to “fact finding and analysis” [3]. Twelve ingredients will carry a case discussion. Four fit on an exam paper.

On the client side the job came even earlier. On 13 May 1931 a junior Procter and Gamble manager named Neil McElroy sent his boss a three-page memo asking for two more hires. It set out the duties of a “brand man”: study shipments of his brands by units, study a weak territory “personally at first hand, both dealers and consumers”, “take full responsibility for all other advertising expenditures” on his brands, and “experiment with and recommend wrapper revisions” [4]. That is product, place and promotion on one desk in Cincinnati, twenty-nine years before anyone alliterated them.

The market itself had changed shape. Richard Tedlow’s history of American mass marketing runs in three phases: fragmentation, when nothing could travel far; unification, when the railroad and the telegraph let brands like Coca-Cola reach the whole country from the 1880s; and segmentation, which he dates to General Motors answering Ford’s single Model T with “the car for every purse and purpose” in the 1920s [5]. A segmented market means more decisions, and more decisions is what a framework is for.

If you learned the four Ps from a Kotler textbook, Kotler is plain about where they came from: “I adopted these and helped popularize the 4Ps of Marketing” [6].

What it changed

The money was already there. Total US advertising spending went from $5,700 million in 1950 to $11,960 million in 1960, a doubling in a decade [7]. As a share of the economy it reached 2.3 per cent of GDP in 1956 and again in 1960, then, in Galbi’s series, drifted down to 1.9 per cent by 1970 [7]. The framework arrived at a high-water mark for advertising’s weight in the economy, and put advertising in one box out of four.

The decade before McCarthy's book was the decade advertising doubled; 1961 is the only year in the series in which spending fell.

Source: Coen Structured Advertising Expenditure Dataset, as published by Douglas Galbi, U.S. Annual Advertising Spending Since 1919, 2008. Redrawn by Brave New Media.

Unit: $ million, current dollars

Show the data

Year	$ million
1950	5,700
1951	6,420
1952	7,140
1953	7,740
1954	8,150
1955	9,150
1956	9,910
1957	10,270
1958	10,310
1959	11,270
1960	11,960
1961	11,860
1962	12,430
1963	13,100
1964	14,150
1965	15,250
1966	16,630
1967	16,870
1968	18,090
1969	19,420
1970	19,550

Advertising's weight in the economy peaked in the year the four Ps were published; the framework arrived at the top of the curve, not the bottom.

Source: Coen Structured Advertising Expenditure Dataset and nominal GDP (Johnston and Williamson; US Bureau of Economic Analysis), as published by Douglas Galbi, 2008. Redrawn by Brave New Media.

Unit: % of GDP

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Year	% of GDP
1950	1.9
1951	1.9
1952	2.0
1953	2.0
1954	2.1
1955	2.2
1956	2.3
1957	2.2
1958	2.2
1959	2.2
1960	2.3
1961	2.2
1962	2.1
1963	2.1
1964	2.1
1965	2.1
1966	2.1
1967	2.0
1968	2.0
1969	2.0
1970	1.9

What a marketer could do the day after was carry a structure around. A student could memorise four words, a professor could examine them, and a manager could write a plan with four headings. Master’s degrees in business awarded in the United States went from 3,280 in 1955-56 to 6,874 in 1960-61 and 25,977 in 1970-71, an eightfold rise in fifteen years [8]. How many of those graduates sat a marketing paper, the table does not say. The ones who did arrived at an employer with the same four words.

The syllabus needed students; the decade after Basic Marketing is the decade the business master's degree became a mass qualification.

Source: US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics 2022, Table 325.25. Redrawn by Brave New Media.

Unit: degrees conferred

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Academic year	Degrees
1955-56	3,280
1957-58	4,223
1959-60	4,814
1960-61	6,874
1961-62	7,838
1962-63	8,479
1963-64	9,469
1964-65	10,765
1965-66	13,142
1966-67	15,108
1967-68	18,048
1968-69	19,568
1969-70	21,561
1970-71	25,977

Kotler started writing his own textbook in 1963; Prentice-Hall published Marketing Management: Analysis, Planning and Control in 1967, and professors told him they adopted it because “it raised respect for the marketing discipline” [6]. Fourteen editions later, Kotler and Keller still open with McCarthy, who “classified various marketing activities into marketing-mix tools of four broad kinds, which he called the four Ps of marketing”, before proposing their own update of people, processes, programs and performance [9]. The framework has outlived its popularisers’ attempts to replace it.

Levitt supplied the other half. The railroads, he wrote, “did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew.” They were in trouble because they “assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business”, which is to say “they were product oriented instead of customer oriented” [2]. The article won the McKinsey Award in 1960 [2] and has sold more than 850,000 reprints, which the Harvard Business School calls one of the best-selling HBR articles of all time [10]. HBR’s editors later said it “introduced the most influential marketing idea of the past half-century: that businesses will do better in the end if they concentrate on meeting customers’ needs rather than on selling products” [2].

Gartner’s annual survey of chief marketing officers puts marketing budgets at 6.4 per cent of company revenue in 2021, 9.5 per cent in 2022, 9.1 per cent in 2023, 7.7 per cent in 2024 and 2025, and 7.8 per cent in 2026 [11, 12, 13, 14]. That is the modern mix, measured. In 2025, 39 per cent of CMOs planned to cut agency budgets [13].

20216.4%

20229.5%

20239.1%

20247.7%

20257.7%

20267.8%

The modern mix in one number: after the pandemic swing, the marketing budget has flattened at a level Gartner's own analysts call an era of less.

Source: Gartner CMO Spend Survey press releases, May 2022 (n=405), May 2024 (n=395), May 2025 (n=402), May 2026 (n=401). Redrawn by Brave New Media.

Unit: % of company revenue

Show the data

Year	% of revenue
2021	6.4
2022	9.5
2023	9.1
2024	7.7
2025	7.7
2026	7.8

At the company where the brand man was invented, advertising still runs at about a tenth of sales. Procter and Gamble’s 10-K filings put advertising costs at $7.3 billion on net sales of $70,950 million in fiscal 2020 and $10.2 billion on $87,032 million in fiscal 2026, between 9.8 and 11.7 per cent in every year between [15, 16, 17].

FY202010.3%

FY202110.8%

FY20229.9%

FY20239.8%

FY202411.4%

FY202510.9%

FY202611.7%

Ninety-five years after McElroy's memo, the brand man's company still spends a tenth of every sales dollar on the fourth P, and the share is rising.

Source: The Procter & Gamble Company, Form 10-K, fiscal 2022, 2025 and 2026, advertising costs note and Consolidated Statements of Earnings; percentage computed by Brave New Media. Redrawn by Brave New Media.

Unit: % of net sales

Show the data

Fiscal year	Advertising $bn	Net sales $m	% of net sales
FY2020	7.3	70,950	10.3
FY2021	8.2	76,118	10.8
FY2022	7.9	80,187	9.9
FY2023	8.0	82,006	9.8
FY2024	9.6	84,039	11.4
FY2025	9.2	84,284	10.9
FY2026	10.2	87,032	11.7

The Mad Men thread

The television series opens in 1960. The agencies its characters are modelled on were real. Rosser Reeves of Ted Bates, who built the “unique selling proposition”, had made the first spot commercials for a presidential candidate in 1952. In 1960 Marion Harper Jr. created Interpublic, the first agency holding company [18].

The series passes a Volkswagen advertisement around a conference table. The record is that the work was Doyle Dane Bernbach’s, the agency Bernbach and Ned Doyle founded with Maxwell Dane in 1949, and that by October 1961 the New York Times described it as “widely recognized as one of this country’s top creative agencies” [19, 20, 21].

David Ogilvy’s shop, opened in 1948 as Hewitt, Ogilvy, Benson and Mather, went public in 1966 as Ogilvy and Mather, among the first agencies to do so [22]. Harper’s holding company and Ogilvy’s listing are the managerial revolution reaching the agencies.

So the Creative Revolution and the managerial revolution arrived in the same year. We read them as two different things. Daniel Pope reads the Creative Revolution as “a revolution in audience segmentation”, in which advertisements “threw a knowing wink to the targeted customer group” expected to buy a Volkswagen [21]. That is Tedlow’s third phase arriving on Madison Avenue. The agencies were getting better at the fourth P at the moment the client was handed a framework for all four.

The division of labour that followed has never been reversed. McCarthy’s book gave the client a desk for each P. McElroy’s brand man already sat at three of them. The agency’s craft mapped onto one. The CMO Survey found in 2026 that marketing is primarily responsible for advertising in 86.9 per cent of US companies, for new products in 32.9 per cent, for pricing in 28.2 per cent and for distribution in 7.5 per cent [23]. Even inside the client, the fourth P is the one marketing reliably owns, and the one it buys from outside. The agency kept promotion in 1960. It has been defending that single box ever since.

Applied: if you are a B2C brand

Say you are launching a beverage brand and the document you call the marketing plan is a media plan: channels, flights, a creative brief, a launch date. We see this plan a lot. It is one P written down and three assumed.

Start where McElroy’s brand man started, with shipments by units. Which stores, which shelf, which temperature, which pack size. That is place, and “we are talking to a distributor” means you do not yet have one. Then product, meaning the format and the drinking occasion, which decide who you sit next to on the shelf and so what your price has to be. Then price, which is three prices: the shelf price, the retailer’s margin, and the promotional price you will be asked for in month three. Only then promotion, and now the media plan has something to promote, a product in a place at a price.

If you are in the sparkling water business you compete on the shelf you chose. If you are in the afternoon-without-coffee business, the shelf, the price and the pack all move. Decide which before the creative brief is written, or the brief decides for you.

Applied: if you are a B2B brand

Say you sell laboratory equipment and your marketing team reports to sales. The reporting line tells you which P the company thinks marketing is. Promotion, in service of a pipeline. It also means nobody owns Levitt’s question.

Ask it in writing. Decide whether you are in the instruments business or the validated-results business. In the first, the four Ps are the box, the list price, the distributor network and the catalogue. In the second, the product includes consumables, calibration, the service contract and training; price can be per result or per month rather than per machine; place includes the laboratory’s procurement portal and the tender; and promotion starts with the people who sign off a method, who are not the people who sign a purchase order. A marketing team that only ever briefs sales collateral is, in Levitt’s phrase, product oriented instead of customer oriented, and it is so by design.

Write the one-sentence answer to “what business are we in”, then write what each P means under that sentence. If marketing owns only one of the four, the plan should say which and why.

What to do with it

1. Write down who sets each of the four Ps in your company, by name. If marketing sets fewer than three, call your plan a communications plan and budget it as one.
2. Before any media budget is approved, answer Levitt’s question in one written sentence and have the person who owns product sign it.
3. Audit your last three marketing plans for the page count given to each P. Fewer than a page on place or on price is the finding.
4. Take the seven brand-man duties in McElroy’s memo and assign each to a current job title. Any duty without an owner is a hole in your mix, and no agency brief will fill it.
5. Report marketing spend as a share of revenue every year, next to the Gartner average and your largest listed competitor’s advertising-to-sales ratio, so the budget conversation starts from a number.