The First P

My first brand management job was at Unilever in Sydney, caring for Raguletto pasta sauce. I was twenty-three. The office was a four-storey campus, and the Home Economics and Food Technology Labs were on the top floor.

Not the basement. Not the factory. The top floor. And all of the top floor.

That detail has stayed with me for thirty years, because it communicates something that no org chart or job description ever quite captures. Product was what mattered most. It sat above everything else, literally, architecturally and commercially. I would go up there to try new pasta sauce recipes, taste different ingredients, test the on-pack recipes we were developing for consumers. The brief ran in both directions: consumer insight shaped the product, and the product shaped the campaign. I was twenty-three and I was upstream of what we were making. That felt natural. That felt like marketing.

Somewhere in the thirty years since, many CMOs and marketers have lost that.

Not in a single decision. Nobody announced that CMOs would henceforth be responsible for promotion and absolved of product. It went quietly, in increments, as everything else arrived. Digital channels multiplied and each one needed managing. CRM and first-party data gave CMOs responsibility for technology infrastructure. Social media added an always-on operational layer. D2C channels created entire new disciplines. Performance marketing demanded constant attention because it was, at last, measurable. MarTech stacks turned the CMO into a technology buyer. Every addition was legitimate. Every one pulled attention downstream toward execution, toward promotion, toward the layer of the mix that was growing most visibly complex.

Product didn't get removed from the CMO remit. It got crowded out. The labs moved to the basement, not literally, but effectively. And nobody noticed, because the basement was quiet while everything else was loud.

The marketing mix has four Ps: Product, Price, Place, Promotion. Product comes first. Not alphabetically, not out of habit, but because without it the other three have nothing to work with. No price worth charging, no place worth being, nothing worth promoting. Most CMO job descriptions today, if you read them honestly, describe a one-P role. Promotion, dressed in the language of all four. (and yes, before you comment below, I know people have tried to add other P's... Purpose etc... but I'm a OG marketer on this point).

Since taking on a role in which Research, Development, and Quality sit alongside brand and communications as a single integrated function, I have been asked more than once (with the slight tilt of the head that signals polite puzzlement) why does R&D report to you?

The question reveals the assumption. The CMO's territory starts where the product ends.

I have never believed that. Marketing's job is to make the truth interesting. The product is the first truth, and the most important one. If you don't own the truth, you are not really in charge of making it interesting. You are in charge of decorating whatever truth someone else has decided to tell.

Every large marketing organisation I have encountered has some version of the fence. On one side: the people who make the product. On the other: the people who sell it. Sometimes it is an organisational boundary. Sometimes a cultural one. Sometimes just an assumption so deeply embedded that nobody has thought to question it in years. But it is almost always there.

At the fence, decisions get made. The product development function makes choices about formulation, format, ingredients, and quality level. Those choices determine, more than anything else, what truths are available for marketing to tell. Then those choices are passed over, and marketing is asked to build brand equity on top of them.

This is where brand investment quietly disappears. Not because the execution is poor but because the product underneath the campaign doesn't support the claim being made. A quality premium on a product reformulated to cut cost. A provenance story for an ingredient whose sourcing doesn't hold up. The advertising is fine. The product undermines it. No amount of media weight will fix a product truth that isn't true.

The fence is expensive. It is where brand trust erodes quietly, over years, through the accumulation of small disappointments. And the marketers on one side of it often don't know it is happening, because they were not in the room when the decisions were made.

I have used this phrase for a long time. It captures something essential about what good marketing does. It does not invent. It does not compensate. It does not distract. It finds what is genuinely, demonstrably, defensibly true about a product and finds the most compelling way to say it.

But notice what the phrase demands before it can operate. It demands that you know what the truth is. You cannot make the truth interesting from a distance. You cannot make it interesting from a brief that summarises it in three bullet points. You cannot make it interesting if the people who understand it most deeply are operating in a different function, with different incentives, and a different set of meetings.

This is why, next month, I will be up at the pea harvest in the north of England. Peas have a harvest window of forty to sixty days. That is it. The whole year's crop, in less than two months. I want to see how they are gathered, how they are graded for maturity using a "tenderometer" (a device that measures the precise tenderness of a pea at the moment of picking) and how Birds Eye has earned the right to the best of that harvest over decades of direct relationships with growers. And then how quickly those peas are individually frozen: not as a preservation technique in the industrial sense, but as a way of capturing, at the exact moment of peak freshness, what nature took all year to produce. No preservatives. Just one: the cold, applied fast enough to make time stop.

Proximity to the product is not a nice-to-have for a CMO. It is the condition under which good marketing becomes possible.

The common framing of AI in our industry is disruption: the value chain consumed from the bottom up, execution commoditised, agencies under pressure. That is true. But there is another way to read the same disruption and one I find considerably more useful.

The downstream complexity that crowded Product out of the CMO remit over the past twenty years with channel fragmentation, content adaptation, media optimisation and performance analytics is precisely what AI is now automating. Not all of it, and not perfectly. But enough to change the equation.

If downstream complexity was the force that pulled CMOs away from the first P, then AI automating that complexity is the force that makes returning to it possible.

Work your way along the consumer journey, stripping out each touchpoint where AI now operates, and you arrive eventually at the one moment it cannot reach. The moment the person opens the packet and tastes the thing. No algorithm intervenes. No model predicts. No system optimises the outcome in real time. The product experience is the last entirely human moment in an increasingly automated consumer journey. It cannot be personalised by a machine. It cannot be rescued by a system that has noticed engagement metrics dropping.

It is just the product. And it is either good enough, or it isn't.

The "great compression", where the simultaneous reduction of cost, headcount, and execution friction that AI is driving across our industry is a threat to those whose value lived in the execution layer. For CMOs who use it to go back upstream, it is something else entirely.

It is permission to go back to the top floor.

The brands that will be standing in fifteen years are not the ones with the best AI-optimised content strategy. They are the ones where the product truth was good enough to survive the moment when every other layer of mediation was stripped away. The ones with something real at the centre.

At category scale, this becomes a responsibility as much as an advantage. The biggest brands don't just compete within a category, they set the quality standard that defines what the category is worth. A CMO who owns the product agenda can exercise that responsibility rather than merely claim it. Category leadership expressed only in communications is not leadership. It is aspiration. The actual leadership is in the product decisions: maintaining a quality standard when reducing it would be cheaper; investing in a genuinely better formulation when an adequate one already exists. Those choices are made upstream. They belong to whoever owns the first P.

Which brings me back to the top floor in Sydney. The labs were there because someone had decided that Product was what the organisation valued most. The building said what the strategy didn't need to. Everything communicates.

If the past twenty years crowded Product out through accumulation, and if AI is now clearing the accumulation, there is a question worth sitting with.

Where are your labs?

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 21 May 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.