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Marketing mix

Model for businesses

  • 13 min read
  • 7 chapters

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Marketing theory emerged in the early twenty-first century. The contemporary marketing mix which has become the dominant framework for marketing management decisions was first published in 1984. In services marketing, an extended marketing mix is used, typically comprising 7 Ps (product, price, promotion, place, people, process, physical evidence), made up of the original 4 Ps extended by process, people and physical evidence. Occasionally service marketers will refer to 8 Ps (product, price, place, promotion, people, positioning, packaging, and performance), comprising these 7 Ps plus performance.

In the 1970's Professor Koichi Shimizu proposed the 4 Cs (commodity, cost, channel, and communication). A newer 4 Cs model emerged in the 1990's as a more customer-driven replacement of the 4 Ps created by Professor Robert Lauterborn, consisting of the 4 Cs (consumer, cost, convenience, and communication).

The correct arrangement of marketing mix by enterprise marketing managers plays an important role in the success of a company's marketing:

  1. Develop strengths and avoid weaknesses
  2. Strengthen the competitiveness and adaptability of enterprises
  3. Ensure the internal departments of the enterprise work closely together

Emergence and growth

The origins of the 4 Ps can be traced to the late 1940s. The first known mention of a mix has been attributed to a Professor of Marketing at Harvard University, James Culliton. In 1948, Culliton published an article entitled The Management of Marketing Costs, in which he describes marketers as "mixers of ingredients". Years later, Culliton's colleague, Professor Neil Borden, published a retrospective article detailing the early history of the marketing mix in which he claims that he was inspired by Culliton's idea of "mixers", and credits himself with popularising the concept of the "marketing mix". According to Borden's account, he used the term "marketing mix" consistently from the late 1940s: for instance, he is known to have used the term "marketing mix" in his presidential address given to the American Marketing Association (AMA) in 1953. Borden did not define the mix, seeing the idea simply as a composition of "the important elements of ingredients" of a marketing programme.

Although the idea of marketers as "mixers of ingredients" caught on, marketers could not reach any real consensus about what elements should be included in the mix until the 1960s. Early schemas to define "mix" include:

  • John Howard's 1957 definition of four groups: product, price, channel, and promotion;
  • Albert Frey's 1961 distinction between the "offering" (product, brand, and price) and the "methods and tools" such as advertising, sales promotion, personal selling, publicity, distribution channels, marketing research, and strategy; and
  • Lazer and Kelly's 1962 model, which distinguished between the goods mix (product, brand, and price), the distribution mix (channels and physical distribution), and the communication mix (advertising and sales).

The 4 Ps, in its modern form, was first proposed in 1960 by E. Jerome McCarthy, who presented them within a managerial approach that covered analysis, consumer behavior, market research, market segmentation, and planning. Philip Kotler popularised this approach and helped spread the 4 Ps model, noting its value from a "pedagogical point of view". McCarthy's 4 Ps have been widely adopted by both marketing academics and practitioners.

The prospect of extending the marketing mix first took hold at the inaugural AMA conference dedicated to Services Marketing in the early 1980s, and built on earlier theoretical works pointing to many important limitations of the 4 Ps model. Taken collectively, the papers presented at that conference indicate that service marketers were thinking about a revision to the general marketing mix based on an understanding that services were fundamentally different from products, and therefore required different tools and strategies. In 1981, Booms and Bitner proposed a model of 7 Ps, comprising the original 4 Ps extended by process, people and physical evidence, as being more applicable for services marketing.

Since then, there have been a number of different proposals for a service marketing mix (with various numbers of Ps); most notably the 8 Ps, comprising the 7 Ps above, extended by 'performance'.

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