The Real 4 Ps of the Modern CMO

Most marketers spend the frist few years learning Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. It’s the foundation of Marketing. It’s what the textbooks teach. It’s what the first decade of a marketing career is built on.

Then you become a CMO, and those four Ps stop being the biggest part of your job.

I came across this episode last week of the Uncensored CMO podcast — Jon Evans in conversation with Susan O’Brien (no relation), former Global CMO of Just Eat, discussing TikTok’s report called “The Real 4 Ps of the CMO.” The report captures something that most senior marketers experience but rarely articulate clearly: the higher you climb, the less time you spend on campaigns and the more time you spend on something that looks very different.

The data in the report is worth digesting further. When CMOs were asked which of the traditional 4 Ps they actually own: Promotion came in at 92% — almost everyone. Place at 48%. Price at 25%. Product at 23%.

Most CMOs don’t own Product. Most don’t own Price. Nearly half don’t own Place. But they’re accountable for growth across all of it. That’s the tension at the heart of the senior marketing role: broad accountability, limited direct control. Which means influence stops being a nice-to-have and starts being the job.

The Real 4 Ps the report identifies — People, Planning, Persuasion, Performance — are the skills that actually determine whether a CMO succeeds. Here’s what they mean in practice, and what they look like through the lens of a lean marketing team.

What surprised me most

Before I get into the four Ps, I want to name the thing that landed hardest for me.

The numbers about Product and Price were the headline. 77% of CMOs don’t own Product. 75% don’t own Price. That sounds like a structural problem, and at a big brand, it is. You’re accountable for growth but you don’t control the commercial levers that drive it.

For lean team CMOs, the reality is different. When you’re running a small team, you’re often closer to Product and commercial decisions than your counterpart at a large organisation. You’re in the room when pricing gets set. You’re talking to the CEO daily. There’s less insulation.

But here’s what makes the lean team version harder: you’re also still doing the traditional 4 (or 7) Ps yourself. At a big brand, you graduate out of campaign execution as you get more senior. You hand it off to specialists. You have channel leads, a content team, an agency managing media, a performance team running the numbers. At a lean team, there’s no one to hand it to. You’re still writing briefs. Still reviewing creative. Still owning the channel mix. Still accountable for the campaign that goes out next week.

The modern CMO 4 Ps don’t replace the traditional ones for lean team marketers. They stack on top. You have to do all of it, simultaneously, with a fraction of the support. That’s not a complaint, it’s why the lean team CMO role builds something that large-org CMOs sometimes don’t have: genuine depth across the whole function, not just the leadership layer.

P1. People

This is the largest part of the role, and the part most marketers are least prepared for.

Hiring. Coaching. Difficult conversations. Managing performance. Developing the people who will eventually be better than you. Creating a culture where good work is the expectation and not the exception. These things consume a significant proportion of a senior marketer’s time and have more impact on outcomes than any individual campaign.

Susan O’Brien frames the People dimension through five principles she calls the Five Cs. That was another thing that clicked for me.

Care. Kind is not the same as nice. The kindest thing you can do for someone on your team is tell them the truth. About their performance, their blind spots, where they’re not leading. Protecting someone from difficult feedback isn’t care. It’s avoidance that costs them the chance to improve.

Clarity. Leadership is repetition. People need to hear the strategy not once, but dozens of times before it becomes the lens through which they make decisions. If you said it once in a planning meeting and moved on, it hasn’t landed. Clear direction, repeated consistently, is one of the most underrated things a marketing leader can provide.

Call it early. Bad behaviours compound. Performance issues don’t improve through avoidance, they deteriorate, affect the team around them, and become significantly harder to address the longer they’re left. The instinct to wait and see is almost always wrong. See it, name it, address it.

The cost of comfort. Every difficult conversation you avoid trades short-term discomfort for long-term damage. The team member who isn’t performing and doesn’t know it. The dynamic that’s undermining collaboration and nobody’s named it. Comfort now is discomfort later, compounded.

Constant feedback. Nothing in an annual review should surprise anyone. If it does, the feedback process has failed. Good leaders give feedback weekly, in real time, as a normal part of how work happens. The formal review is a summary of things already said, not a revelation.

For lean teams, the People P is especially unforgiving. There’s no slack in a small team to absorb a bad hire, a toxic dynamic, or a leadership failure. In a team of forty, one wrong person is a problem. In a team of four, they’re THE problem. The conversations that feel too difficult to have are almost always the ones most worth having.

P2. Planning

Planning is not annual budgeting. Budgeting is the financial expression of planning, it comes after the strategic decisions have been made, not instead of them.

Real planning is the discipline of deciding what you’re doing, what you’re not doing, and how the resources you have connect to the outcomes the business needs. It requires the ability to say no; to good ideas, to channel requests, to initiatives that are interesting but not important. It requires connecting marketing strategy to business strategy in a way that’s visible to people outside marketing, not just legible to people inside it.

The TikTok report identified strategy as the biggest capability gap among marketers surveyed. That finding is worth dwelling on. Execution is abundant. The tools for executing marketing have never been more accessible. Almost anyone can run a paid campaign, publish content, build an email sequence. The supply of execution is high and getting higher.

Strategic thinking — the ability to decide which of those executions is worth doing, in which order, for which audience, in service of which outcome is scarce. It doesn’t come from tools. It comes from experience, judgment, and the discipline to think before acting.

For lean marketers, planning is where you earn the right to lead. When resources are limited, every decision about where they go is a real trade-off. The teams that execute everything that comes in end up doing a lot of things averagely. The teams with a clear plan (what we’re doing, what we’re not doing, and why) tend to do fewer things much better.

Planning is also where the lean team advantage is most visible. You can change direction faster. You can make decisions in a conversation rather than a committee. You don’t have the bureaucracy that slows down strategic pivots at large organisations. That agility is only an advantage if you have a clear enough strategy to pivot from.

P3. Persuasion

Marketing’s biggest audience is often internal.

That’s a slightly uncomfortable thing to admit, because it implies that a significant part of the CMO’s job isn’t building the brand or growing the customer base, it’s selling ideas upward, sideways, and across functions to people who have different priorities and different metrics.

But it’s true. The most brilliant marketing strategy in the world doesn’t get executed without budget, cross-functional alignment, and leadership support. All of those require persuasion. The ability to make a compelling case, to bring people along, to build the coalition before the meeting where the decision gets made.

“The meeting is rarely where decisions are made.” That’s one of the clearest things I’d tell anyone moving into a senior marketing role. By the time a decision lands in a formal meeting, the outcome is usually already determined. The persuasion happened in the corridor, in the one-on-one, in the pre-read that got circulated three days before. The CMOs who lose budget battles are often the ones who showed up to the meeting without having done that groundwork.

This isn’t political manipulation. It’s how organisations really function. Influence is part of the job. Understanding what your CFO cares about, what your CEO is worried about, what your Head of Sales needs to feel confident and being able to connect marketing’s priorities to those things, is a core leadership skill.

For lean team CMOs, this is where you often have to work hardest. You can’t point to a $50 million budget as evidence that marketing matters. You have to win on argument, not scale. That requires knowing your numbers, knowing your audience, and building the case before you walk in the room.

The upside is that lean team CMOs who develop genuine persuasion skills tend to be more effective at it than their large-org counterparts. They’ve had to be.

P4. Performance

CMOs own outcomes. Not activity.

There’s a version of marketing leadership that measures itself by how much is produced — campaigns launched, content published, channels activated. That version is measuring the wrong thing. Marketing doesn’t exist to make advertising. Marketing exists to create commercial value.

The shift from activity to outcomes is both simple and uncomfortable. Simple because the question is clear: did marketing contribute to revenue, retention, and growth? Uncomfortable because activity is easy to report and outcomes are harder to claim, given the attribution problem that anyone who’s worked in marketing understands well.

The report is clear on this: CMOs are accountable for brand health, revenue, and growth. Not impressions. Not engagement. Not share of voice, unless share of voice is demonstrably connected to something commercial.

This doesn’t mean brand metrics don’t matter, they do, particularly as a leading indicator of commercial performance. But they need to be part of a chain that connects to outcomes the business cares about. A CMO who can only report on marketing metrics is speaking a language the board doesn’t use. A CMO who can connect brand health to customer acquisition cost to revenue growth is speaking the language of the business.

For lean team CMOs, Performance is where credibility is built or lost. Every conversation about budget, headcount, or strategic priority comes back to: what has marketing actually returned? The teams that can answer that question clearly tend to get more resources. The teams that can’t tend to get cut first.

The AI dimension

If you’ve been reading this and thinking “this sounds like a lot of soft skills,” here’s the reframe.

AI is making execution cheaper and faster. The cost of producing a campaign brief, a piece of content, a performance report, or a media plan is dropping. Execution is becoming less scarce, which means it becomes less valuable as a differentiator.

What AI doesn’t do: hire well, give difficult feedback with the right calibration, build a strategic plan that accounts for the political realities of your organisation, persuade a sceptical CFO, or take accountability for outcomes in a board meeting.

The Real 4 Ps (People, Planning, Persuasion, Performance) are not just the current description of the CMO role. They’re the direction the entire function is moving as AI handles more of the execution layer. The marketers who are spending the next five years building leadership skills, strategic thinking, and commercial fluency are positioning themselves for a world where those things are the primary source of differentiation. The ones doubling down only on execution skills are building expertise in the thing that’s getting commoditised fastest.

What this means if you’re building toward a senior marketing role

Marketing used to reward specialists. The CMO role rewards orchestrators.

As you move up, your success becomes less about producing brilliant work yourself and more about creating the conditions for your team to produce brilliant work. That transition is harder than it sounds, especially for people who got to where they are by being excellent at doing things.

The four Ps that got you here, the campaign skills, the channel knowledge, the creative judgment, still matter. Particularly in a lean team where you never fully hand them off. But they’re table stakes. The thing that determines whether a senior marketing leader is genuinely effective is how well they lead people, how clearly they plan, how skilfully they persuade, and how honestly they’re accountable for performance.

The good news is that these are buildable skills. They don’t require a big team or a big brand to develop. In some ways, lean teams are a better training ground for them than large organisations. There’s nowhere to hide, every decision matters, and the feedback loop from leadership failure to visible consequence is short.

The TikTok report and Susan O’Brien’s experience at Just Eat put clear language to something many marketers intuitively feel but don’t always name. The job changes as you get more senior. The sooner you understand how, the sooner you can start building for it.

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Interested in the whole chat, you can watch The Real 4 Ps of the CMO — TikTok report, discussed on Uncensored CMO with Susan O’Brien, former Global CMO of Just Eat.*