The Marketing Mix

It has been the most convenient concept ever since its evolution by Neil Borden in 1949. “An executive is a mixer of ingredients, who sometimes follows a recipe as he goes along, sometimes adapts a recipe to the ingredients immediately available, and sometimes experiments with or invents ingredients no one else has tried." (Culliton, J. 1948)

According to Borden, "When building a marketing program to fit the needs of his firm, the marketing manager has to weigh the behavioral forces and then juggle marketing elements in his mix with a keen eye on the resources with which he has to work." (Borden, N. 1964 pg 365).

E. Jerome McCarthy (McCarthy, J. 1960), was the first person to suggest the four P's of marketing – price, promotion, product and place (distribution) – which constitute the most common variables used in constructing a marketing mix. According to McCarthy the marketers essentially have these four variables which they can use while crafting a marketing strategy and writing a marketing plan. In the long term, all four of the mix variables can be changed, but in the short term it is difficult to modify the product or the distribution channel.

Another set of marketing mix variables were developed by Albert Frey (Frey, A. 1961) who classified the marketing variables into two categories: the offering, and process variables. The "offering" consists of the product, service, packaging, brand, and price. The "process" or "method" variables included advertising, promotion, sales promotion, personal selling, publicity, distribution channels, marketing research, strategy formation, and new product development.

Recently, Bernard Booms and Mary Bitner built a model consisting of seven P's (Booms, B. and Bitner, M. 1981). They added "People" to the list of existing variables, in order to recognize the importance of the human element in all aspects of marketing. They added "process" to reflect the fact that services, unlike physical products, are experienced as a process at the time that they are purchased. Desktop modeling tools such as Micro TSP have made this kind of statistical analysis part of the mainstream now. Most advertising agencies and strategy consulting firms offer MMM services to their clients.

Everything that was dubbed the “marketing mix” hinged on these four pivots. And this model worked for business because consumers were fragmented and mostly without say in mass-market contexts.

Then something big happened: with the digital age came the democratization of information-sharing and a shift in the influencial power of consumers. Gone were the days of running from store-to-store to shop, or waiting hours on the phone to reach customer service ... We had moved to an age of Google & YouTube to find the stuff we wanted, and the Facebook-Twitter duo to let everyone know how it worked out. Oh, and Amazon too if we wanted to do all that in one place.

This new reality spawned marketing buzzwords such as “customer-centric”, “CRM” and “CEM”, with companies racing to reorganize and integrate the customer experience within their marketing strategies.

Content, Communications, Community and Care: the 4 ‘new’ C’s of the Marketing Mix (and oh, how convenient!).

More and more today, companies are driven to produce and execute digital Content that reaches and engages consumers via outbound and now inbound marketing efforts — vastly different and far more work than the 30-second TV spot of yesterday.

Next, company Communications are driven to amplify these new content marketing activities via the Press, opinion leaders and word-of-mouth efforts. This not only happens offline, but now also within the same digital space as marketers — a potential for inefficiencies and confusion if the roles of brand communications and corporate communications are not clear, and moreso if Communications overall is not integrated within the Marketing Mix. Communications is Marketing.

Consumers then come together over this new company Content and Communication to form digital Communities where they share, learn, critique and love the company’s products and services online. This drives companies to get involved, if only by listening at first, and ultimately by assigining representatives to engage within these communities (Community Managers).

Finally, all of this new company and consumer activity inevitably stirs-up a lot of questions, and the company is driven to ready and augment its customer Care efforts — good customer care now equals its weight in earned media (besides just being responsible), and bad customer care can now spiral into an outright crisis overnight via tweets, videos, posts and comments online.

We quickly see how these 4-Cs play an important role in the new Marketing Mix, and why consumer companies and brands are investing increasing amounts in this space. Equally important, companies and brands are realizing that the 4-Cs are now inter-connected thanks to digital:

Any consumer engagement role created within an organization would benefit from connecting these 4 areas, avoiding or breaking-down silos around them.

The digital space is complex and constantly changing, but one thing that we can be pretty certain about is that it puts the consumer more than ever at the center of things.