You walk into a Centra on the way home. You are in front of the crisp shelf. Six brands, three flavours each, eighteen choices. You reach for one without reading the label. Tayto, maybe. Or whichever one your mam always buys. You did not decide in that moment. Your brain had already decided, months or years ago, based on the brand.

That instant choice did not happen by accident. The company behind that packet made a long list of careful decisions: what the product is, what it costs, where it sits on the shelf, how they tell people about it. Today you are going to make those same decisions for your own mini-business.

Marketing has a famous shorthand called the 4Ps. Together with a clear brand, these are the five decisions every business makes about how it reaches and convinces customers.

Notice how the four Ps have to agree with each other. A premium price needs a premium-looking product, a premium place to sell it from, and promotion that feels premium too. If the Ps fight each other (premium price, scruffy stall, no signs), customers feel something is off and walk past.

Meet Match Day Hot Choc, a fictional TY mini-company set up by three students. They sell hot chocolate at their local GAA club's home matches between October and February. Here is how they made every brand and 4Ps decision.

Their brand

• Brand name: Match Day Hot Choc — says exactly when and what. No mystery, no cleverness for the sake of it.
• Colour and logo idea: A simple red-and-gold wraparound cup sleeve with the club crest colours. They want it to look like it belongs at the match, not like it had wandered in from a coffee shop.
• Core marketing message (one sentence): "Hot chocolate that warms cold sidelines." Notice it names the customer (people on the sideline) and the benefit (warmth on a cold day). It does not say "high-quality artisan cocoa product" — that would sound wrong to a freezing parent.

Their 4Ps

Answer to the prediction: at €5, the Place would break first. A folding stall at a GAA gate signals "casual, impulse, hands-cold". €5 signals "sit-down café". The two would fight each other and customers would walk past. (You could also argue Promotion breaks — an Instagram caption that says "€5 hot chocolate" doesn't get parents to stop scrolling.)

That principle — every P has to agree with every other P — is what makes the social post work too. Here is the post Match Day Hot Choc drafted.

Their first social post

• Platform: Instagram. That is where the under-14 parents in the area actually scroll in the evening.
• Caption: "Sub-zero on the sidelines tomorrow? Find us at the club gate from 1pm. €3 a cup, served warm. See you there. ☕❄️"
• Image idea: A close shot of a steaming cup of hot chocolate held up against the frosty pitch in the background, with fingerless gloves visible around the cup. No people's faces, no busy backdrop — one cup, one frosty pitch, one promise.

Notice how every part agrees. The product is hands-on-cup warmth. The price is impulse-buy. The place is right in the customer's path. The promotion lands the evening before, in the place the customer is already scrolling. The social post extends the same message: cold sidelines, warm cup, see you tomorrow. No part of this fights any other part.

That is your job in the next two steps: make all five decisions for your own mini-business so they all agree with each other.

Now apply the 4Ps to your own mini-business. You have already chosen the idea, defined your customer, built the business model, and worked out the price and costs earlier in this unit. The 4Ps pulls all of that into one marketing-shaped grid.

Instructions: The four Ps are already labelled in the first column. Fill in your decision in column 2 and your reason in column 3, going in order:

1. Product — what exactly you sell (be specific: size, packaging, what is included)
2. Price — what you charge per unit (use the figure from your Budget Sheet)
3. Place — where the customer actually buys it (be specific: which stall, which app, which event)
4. Promotion — how they hear about you in the first place

For the third column, do not just describe — explain why that choice is right for your Customer Persona. The Why column is what makes the difference between a marketing plan and a list of guesses.