Written by
Abbie Mason
Why Businesses Still Get the Four Ps Wrong
And Why It’s Costing Them Growth
Introduction
Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.
The Four Ps of marketing remain the clearest framework for commercial success. Yet in the UK in 2024 and 2025, businesses prioritised visibility, expansion, and brand perception, often overlooking the fundamentals that drive revenue.
The result is closures, declining demand, and loss of trust.
What are the Four Ps?
Product: What you sell and whether it delivers repeat value
Price: Whether cost aligns with perceived and actual value
Place: Where and how customers access you
Promotion: How you communicate and convert attention into demand
They operate as a system. When one fails, the others follow.
1. Price: when positioning doesn’t match reality
In 2024, Premier Inn had an advert banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for promoting rooms “from £35 per night” when only limited availability existed.
The ASA ruled the claim misleading, stating that consumers would reasonably expect meaningful availability at that price.
This is a clear pricing failure:
The headline price drove demand.
The product could not deliver at scale.
Trust was eroded immediately.
In a pressured market, this matters. 3,464 UK hospitality businesses became insolvent in 2024 (Buchler Phillips, “Hospitality Index Report”).
Pricing is not a marketing hook. It is a promise.
2. Product: when demand is driven by novelty, not retention
Karen’s Diner is one of the clearest recent examples of product misalignment.
The brand scaled rapidly across the UK, driven by viral content and a confrontational dining experience. By 2024, the UK business had entered liquidation, owing over £400,000, with multiple site closure.
The issue was not awareness. It was product design:
Built for first-time visits, not repeat visits
Experience fatigue set in quickly.
Controversy overtook value
Visibility generates trial. Only product-market fit sustains demand.
3. Place: when expansion ignores behaviour
Expansion into the wrong locations remains one of the most consistent drivers of failure in UK hospitality.
In 2024, Chipotle closed its Watford site, its first major move outside London, highlighting the risk of expanding beyond core urban demand without proven behavioural alignment.
This reflects a wider issue:
Demand does not transfer evenly across locations.
Secondary areas often lack sufficient footfall.
Brand awareness does not equal local relevance.
Industry analysis continues to identify location as one of the leading causes of restaurant failure (The Caterer, “Why restaurants fail”).
Place is not about presence. It is about context.
Getting it wrong leads to:
Lower repeat visits
Higher acquisition costs
Reduced profitability per site
4. Promotion: when marketing outpaces relevance
Promotion is often the most visible part of marketing and the most overinvested.
TGI Fridays’ UK operator entered administration in 2024, despite strong brand recognition and sustained marketing investment.
The issue was not visibility. It was relevance:
Positioned as premium casual dining
The market shifted towards value-led and independent venues.
The experience no longer justified the price.
Promotion amplified a proposition that no longer matched customer expectations.
As wider consumer analysis shows, brands that fail to adapt to shifting demand decline faster, regardless of marketing investment (Grant Thornton, “Consumer sector failure insights”).
Promotion does not fix weak fundamentals. It exposes them.
The current market: less margin for error
The UK hospitality landscape is tightening:
Over 4,000 venues closed in 2024 (Restroworks, “UK restaurant failure statistics”)
The sector is shrinking by 62 net closures per month (UKHospitality, “Sector closure data”)
At the same time:
Consumers are more selective.
Price sensitivity is higher.
Expectations are immediate
This environment quickly exposes any weakness across the Four Ps.
Why businesses keep getting it wrong
Visibility over viability
Campaigns are prioritised before fundamentals are validated.
Expansion before demand
Locations are opened without behavioural proof.
Internal vision over customer reality
Brand ambition overrides real usage patterns.
Fragmented strategy
Each P is managed separately, not as a system.
What needs to change
The Four Ps should act as a constant pressure test:
Does the product drive repeat demand?
Is the price credible in the current market?
Is the place aligned with real behaviour?
Does the promotion reflect reality?
If one element is neglected, the business can lose revenue, customers, and relevance. Each P must support the others for sustainable growth.
Conclusion
Final thought
Most businesses do not fail because of a lack of creativity. They fail because they move too far away from the fundamentals. The Four Ps are still the best indicator of whether a business will scale or decline. Across the UK, we see what happens when they are ignored.