Product, price, place, promotion. The 4 Ps were born in 1960, in E. Jerome McCarthy’s textbook Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, and they have been one of the first frameworks taught on any marketing course ever since. When people talk about the 4 Ps of sports marketing, they usually explain them from the point of view of those who sell sport: the club, the league, the event organiser. The product is the match, the price is the ticket, the place is the stadium or the platform that broadcasts the race.

It is a correct reading, but it is half the picture. In my view, for a company assessing a sponsorship, the same four Ps need to be read from the other side of the table: not how sport is sold, but how sport is used to sell something else. There are still four letters. What changes is what is inside them.

Where the 4 Ps come from

The term marketing mix belongs to Neil Borden, a professor at Harvard Business School, who was already using it in his teaching in the late 1940s, inspired by his colleague James Culliton and his image of the manager as a mixer of ingredients. Borden listed a dozen of them; in 1960 McCarthy grouped them into four families: product, price, place, promotion. In 1964 Borden traced the history of the concept in his article The Concept of the Marketing Mix. In 1981 Bernard Booms and Mary Jo Bitner added three Ps designed for services: people, process and physical evidence.

In sport, one of the reference textbooks is Sport Marketing by Bernard Mullin, Stephen Hardy and William Sutton (first edition 1993), which counts five Ps: it adds public relations to the classic four. I will come back to it later, because it is the P that best explains the difference between sport and any other medium.

The 4 Ps from the side of those who sell sport

• Product: the event, the team, the experience in the grandstand and in front of the screen, merchandising, digital content.
• Price: tickets, season tickets, hospitality packages, the cost of following the race on TV or streaming.
• Place: where and how the product reaches the audience, meaning the venue, the calendar, the broadcast channels.
• Promotion: advertising, social media, campaigns and initiatives to fill the stands and grow the fan base.

This is the perspective of the marketing of sport. We have explained the difference with marketing through sport, which is what companies do when they sponsor, in our article on the types of sports marketing.

The 4 Ps from the side of the brand that sponsors

Here the same letters become four different questions. It is the side of the table where the companies we work with sit, and in more than thirty years of sponsorship I have seen many mistakes come precisely from confusing the two sides.

1. Product: what you are really buying

For a sponsor, the product is not the race. It is the rights: the space on the bike or the car, the status of official partner, the use of names and images, hospitality, paddock access, category exclusivity. Two contracts with the same logo in the same spot on the fairing can be worth very different things, depending on what is written behind it.

2. Price: the figure on the contract is not the cost

The price of a sponsorship has two parts: the rights fee and the budget to activate those rights. The property collects the first; the brand spends the second to turn the rights into results, through events, content, hospitality and campaigns. In my experience, those who budget only for the first end up with the logo and without the means to use it. How much the second should weigh depends on the objectives, and it is one of the decisions we discuss in our guide to strategic sports marketing.

3. Place: the championship is a distribution channel

For a club, place is the stadium. For a brand, it is the audience the championship brings with it, and where it brings it. Every championship has a calendar, which is a map of markets: choosing MotoGP, Formula 1 or WEC means choosing in which countries, in front of which people and in which weeks of the year to be present. Before asking how much a championship costs, it is worth asking whether it passes through the markets where the company sells.

4. Promotion: activation

For a team, promotion is there to sell tickets. For a sponsor, promotion is activation: everything the company does with the rights it has bought, from client invitations to campaigns with the riders and drivers, from social content to in-store initiatives. Without activation, a sponsorship is an empty sticker on a bike. With activation, it becomes a commercial tool.

The fifth P: public relations

Mullin, Hardy and Sutton add public relations as a fifth lever, and anyone who works in the paddock immediately understands why it matters: sport makes its own news. A race generates stories before, during and after, and a company that is part of it enters that flow without buying every single space. In my view, for a B2B brand it is often the most valuable P, because a story told by others is more convincing than a paid advertisement.

The 4 Ps, or 5, should not be confused with the areas into which sports marketing is divided, which we have described in the matrix of the 4 macro areas of sports marketing. The former are the levers of a decision; the latter tell you in which context it is taken.

Three mistakes I see most often

First, reading the 4 Ps from the wrong side. A company that assesses a sponsorship with the tools of those who sell tickets ends up measuring the wrong things: how many people were there, rather than how many of them were relevant to it.

Second, confusing price with the fee. The rights fee is the start of the spending, not the spending. The activation budget should be decided together with the rights, not afterwards.

Third, measuring promotion in exposure. Media value is useful for comparing two packages, not for proving a return. The return is measured against what the company wants to achieve: leads, contracts, sales.

In which order to read them

My advice is to read the four Ps in a different order from the textbook. Place first, because it tells you whether the audience that matters is there. Then promotion, because it tells you what will be done with the rights. Then product, meaning which rights are really needed to do it. Price last. Those who start from price tend to buy what costs least, not what is needed.

If you are assessing who to do this work with, we have set out the criteria that matter in our guide on how to choose a sports marketing agency.

The 4 Ps are the same for everyone. The side of the table is not.