A client once asked me to skip straight to “the AI stuff” and forget the boring foundational questions. I told her the boring foundational questions are the only reason the AI stuff works at all. She was not thrilled with that answer. She was, eventually, thrilled with the results, which is the only kind of vindication I actually care about.
The four Ps still run the show, and here’s what Product actually means right now.
Product, price, place, promotion. Older than the internet, older than most of the buildings your business operates out of, and still the exact four things most people skip when they get excited about a new tool. The four Ps have survived every technology shift of the last sixty years for a simple reason: they’re not a marketing tactic, they’re the underlying structure of any exchange where someone gives you money and expects something back. AI doesn’t touch that structure. It just makes the execution faster once the structure is sound, and painfully obvious when it isn’t.
Product is the one people think they’ve already answered. “I sell haircuts.” “I sell plumbing.” Fine, but that’s not actually what Product means. Product is what specifically changes for the customer because they chose you instead of the seventeen other options in a five mile radius. A haircut isn’t a product, it’s a category. “The one place in town where a stylist actually remembers what you said last time and doesn’t try to upsell you on your way out” is a product. If you can’t answer that in one sentence, no AI tool is going to write your way around the gap, it’s just going to write a very polished version of the gap, which is arguably worse, because now the gap has good lighting.
Here’s why this matters more in the AI era, not less. When everyone can produce clean, competent marketing instantly, competent marketing stops being a differentiator. It becomes table stakes, the price of entry, like having a phone number. The thing that actually separates you moves back upstream, to whether the product underneath the marketing is genuinely distinct. AI raised the floor on execution for everyone simultaneously, which means the game quietly moved to the one place AI can’t help you: knowing what you actually are, and being something worth choosing.
Here’s where AI genuinely helps once you’ve answered that question honestly: it’s excellent at helping you say the same true thing forty different ways for forty different platforms, testing angles, tightening language, catching where you buried the important part in paragraph three. It’s useless at figuring out what the true thing actually is in the first place.
That part’s still yours, and I’d argue it always will be, because it’s not a language problem.
It’s a business problem wearing a language costume.
Takeaway: AI can say your product’s value forty different ways. It can’t decide what that value actually is.
Try this: Write one sentence answering “what specifically changes for my customer because they chose me.” Not what you do, what changes for them. If it takes you more than a minute, that’s not a failure, that’s the single most useful minute you’ll spend on your marketing this month, because everything downstream depends on that answer.
A quick note for anyone new here: alongside this newsletter, I run a platform called T2 HQ. It’s a set of 25 AI marketing specialists built for small business owners, each one trained on a specific job, like a full blown Marketing Firm, so you’re not starting from a blank chat window every time. One of them, Petra, does exactly the exercise above, she takes your answer to “what changes for my customer” and turns it into a sharp, usable value proposition you can actually build marketing around. You don’t need it to do this by hand, that’s what the Try This is for. But if you’d rather have a specialist walk you through it, that’s what Petra and her peers are there for. More at hq.t2marketingstrategies.com.
Talk soon, Tiffany