{"id":243634,"date":"2024-07-05T07:38:04","date_gmt":"2024-07-05T05:38:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rtrsports.com\/which-are-the-4-p-of-sports-marketing\/"},"modified":"2026-10-22T18:20:51","modified_gmt":"2026-10-22T16:20:51","slug":"which-are-the-4-p-of-sports-marketing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rtrsports.com\/en\/blog\/which-are-the-4-p-of-sports-marketing\/","title":{"rendered":"The 4 Ps of sports marketing: how they change when a sponsor uses them"},"content":{"rendered":"

Product, price, place, promotion. The 4 Ps were born in 1960, in E. Jerome McCarthy’s textbook Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Where the 4 Ps come from<\/h2>\n

The term marketing mix belongs to Neil Borden<\/strong>, 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<\/strong> 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<\/em>. In 1981 Bernard Booms and Mary Jo Bitner<\/strong> added three Ps designed for services: people, process and physical evidence.<\/p>\n

In sport, one of the reference textbooks is Sport Marketing<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

The 4 Ps from the side of those who sell sport<\/h2>\n