Four Ps

The 'marketing mix' (also known as the four Ps) is a foundation concept in marketing. The marketing mix has been defined as the "set of marketing tools that the firm uses to pursue its marketing objectives in the target market". Thus the marketing mix refers to four broad levels of marketing decision, namely: product, price, promotion, and place. Marketing practice has been occurring for millennia, but marketing theory emerged in the early twentieth century. The contemporary marketing mix, or the 4Ps, which has become the dominant framework for marketing management decisions, was first published in 1960. In services marketing, a modified and expanded marketing mix is used, typically comprising seven Ps made up of the original 4 Ps plus process, people, physical environment. Occasionally service marketers will refer to eight Ps; comprising the 7 Ps plus performance.

In the 1990s, the concept of four Cs was introduced as a more customer-driven replacement of the four Ps. There are two theories based on four Cs: Lauterborn's four Cs (consumer, cost, communication, convenience), and Shimizu's four Cs (commodity, cost, communication, channel).

Given the valuation of customers towards potential product attributes (in any category, e.g. product, promotion, etc.) and the attributes of the products sold by other companies, the problem of selecting the attributes of a product to maximize the number of customers preferring it is a computationally intractable problem.

The origins of the four 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, Prof. James Culliton. In 1948, Culliton published an article entitled, The Management of Marketing Costs in which Culliton describes marketers as 'mixers of ingredients'. Some 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 in 1953.

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. The 4 Ps, in its modern form, was first proposed in 1960 by E. Jerome McCarthy in his text-book, Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach. McCarthy used the 4 Ps as an organising framework for the entire work with chapters devoted to each of the elements, contained within a managerial approach that also included chapters dedicated to analysis, consumer behavior, marketing research, market segmentation and planning to round out the managerial approach. Phillip Kotler, a prolific author, popularised the managerial approach, and with it, spread the concept of the 4 Ps. McCarthy's 4 Ps have been widely adopted by both marketing academics and practitioners.

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