A few months ago I sat through a marketing plan presentation that could have been delivered, almost word for word, in 1975. The product positioning was sharp. The pricing tiers were modelled to the decimal. Distribution was mapped channel by channel. The promotional calendar was colour-coded for the year ahead.
On its own terms, it was an excellent plan. When I asked who was key for the launch, and how much of a key competitor’s speed advantage came from the way its people used the AI tools already sitting on their desks, the room went quiet. Not because the questions were unfair. Because a plan built entirely and beautifully around four variables had never been asked to think about the other three.
Every business student of the last two generations has learned some version of the same four words: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. E Jerome McCarthy coined the classification in 1960, in a textbook written mostly for American manufacturers deciding how to move soap and cereal through a market with three television channels and a handful of national retailers.
Philip Kotler did not invent it, but his own Marketing Management, first published in 1967, turned McCarthy’s four words into the operating system that several generations of executives, myself included, were trained to run a business on. For a long time it worked, because getting all four right was genuinely rare, and therefore genuinely decisive.
Here is the uncomfortable part. The four Ps did not get harder to execute. They got easier — and that is exactly why they stopped being where the advantage lives. Distribution once took decades of relationships with wholesalers and precious shelf space; today it can be rented from a marketplace app in an afternoon.
Price used to hide behind geography and opacity; today a customer in Bangkok compares it against Singapore, Ho Chi Minh City and Amazon before finishing a coffee. Product features get matched within a single product cycle.
Promotion is so fragmented across channels that the budget which once bought certainty today buys, at best, a chance to be noticed. Once everyone can finally execute the original four competently, competence stops being the differentiator. It becomes the entry fee.
Three additions now decide who actually wins with the four Ps still firmly in hand. None of them appear in McCarthy’s original textbook.
The Partnership Premium
In 1998, when Starbucks wanted its brand inside Thailand, it did not attempt to out-build local retail expertise on its own. It partnered — first through a joint venture, and since 2019 through a full licence to Coffee Concepts Thailand, itself a partnership between Fraser & Neave of Singapore and Maxim’s Group of Hong Kong, two operators who already knew how to run food and beverage retail at scale across Southeast Asia.
The chain grew from a single store at Central Chidlom to 500 outlets by 2024, with another 300 planned by 2030. Almost none of that growth came from the coffee, which tastes identical in every market Starbucks enters. Nearly all of it came from partnering with operators who understood terrain that Starbucks did not, and then genuinely letting them run it.
Partnership is not only a question of who. It is a question of when. Pfizer and BioNTech had already been working together since 2018 on an unrelated mRNA-based flu vaccine — Pfizer supplying global manufacturing scale and regulatory reach, BioNTech supplying an mRNA platform Pfizer did not have of its own.
Neither company built that relationship with a pandemic in mind. But when one arrived, the two redirected the same collaboration towards a Covid-19 vaccine, and at the precise moment the world’s regulators and supply chains were suddenly willing to move at emergency speed, they had an authorised vaccine in under nine months. The partnership existed well before the crisis. What made it decisive was the timing of when it was redirected.
Ask any leadership team a blunter version of the same question: which of the capabilities your strategy depends on are actually owned, and which are quietly borrowed through a partnership nobody has re-evaluated in five years?
The People Multiplier
In 2018, the numbers of the US telecom giant AT&T numbers told an uncomfortable story: roughly half of its 250,000 employees held skills the company’s own strategy would make redundant within a decade. Most companies facing that arithmetic choose the cheaper, faster option — replace the workforce rather than rebuild it.
AT&T instead committed roughly a billion dollars to a programme it called Future Ready, retraining its own people largely through partnerships with universities and online course providers, turning switchboard-era employees into cloud and software engineers instead of turning them into former employees.
It became a Harvard Business School case study for a simple reason: the company’s bet was that AT&T could change its strategy far faster than it could change its people — unless it invested in the people before the strategy shift arrived, not after.
The lesson generalises well beyond telecoms. I see the same pattern in almost every transformation that stalls: the strategy changes on a slide long before the organisation has the skills to execute it, and leaders discover the gap only once the plan is already failing quietly in front of a client.
People strategy is not a department, and it is not a slide with headcount numbers on it. It is the ceiling on how ambitious the other six Ps are allowed to be.
AI Productivity, Not AI Adoption
The consultancy McKinsey puts the annual value generative AI could add to the global economy in the trillions of dollars, and not for novel reasons — for very ordinary work done considerably faster. In a randomised study, software engineers using GitHub’s AI coding assistant completed a coding task 55.8% faster than a control group without it. None of that gain came from purchasing a licence.
The gains came from redesigning how the work actually gets done around the tool — which is exactly why so many leadership teams can say, in the very same breath, “we have rolled out AI across the business” and “we have not yet seen it show up in productivity.”
AI does not multiply an organisation. It multiplies whatever the organisation already is: the clarity of its processes, and the skill of the people directing it. Which is also why this new P refuses to stand alone. An AI rollout without a people strategy behind it is a subscription. An AI rollout with one behind it is a productivity gain.
Three Questions Worth Asking
- Which of the capabilities your strategy depends on are actually owned, and which are quietly borrowed through a partnership nobody has re-evaluated in years?
- If your strategy changed direction tomorrow, would your current people and their skills follow it — or would you need an almost entirely different team to execute the new plan?
- Can you point to one specific process that now runs measurably faster or better because of AI, or only to a subscription that was purchased and a slide that says so?
The old four Ps built businesses that could out-produce, out-price, out-distribute and out-advertise their rivals, and a leader who ignores them still fails quickly, and deservedly.
The three additions decide something quieter and more modern: who a business chooses to stand next to, who it chooses to keep and grow, and how intelligently it multiplies the work of both.
Managing a business was never really about mastering a list of variables. It was always about deciding, in a given quarter, which of these seven deserves your attention most — and having the discipline to actually move it there.
Get the original four right and you have built a competent business. Get all seven right, and deliberately, and you have built one that is genuinely difficult to copy.
Dr Philios Andreou Sphika is the Deputy CEO and President of the Other Markets Unit, including Thailand and Asia, at BTS Group, a leading global strategy execution consulting firm specialising in the people side of strategy. For executives who are interested in connecting, Dr Philios can be reached at philios.andreou@bts.com or visit his LinkedIn profile.