A young marketing executive was leaving the office at 6 pm when he found the CEO standing in front of a shredder with a piece of paper in hand.

“Listen,” said the CEO, “this is important, and my secretary has left. Can you make this thing work”/“Certainly,” said the young marketing executive, keen to please his boss. He turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the start button.“Excellent, excellent!” said the CEO as his paper disappeared inside the machine. “I just need one copy.” ~ (www.webmarketingezine.com/marketing-jokes)

“Listen,” said the CEO, “this is important, and my secretary has left. Can you make this thing work”/

“Certainly,” said the young marketing executive, keen to please his boss. He turned the machine on, inserted the paper, and pressed the start button.

“Excellent, excellent!” said the CEO as his paper disappeared inside the machine. “I just need one copy.” ~ (www.webmarketingezine.com/marketing-jokes)

Every student of marketing must know about the ‘marketing mix’. It is amazing how a simple, and even simplistic term could be first coined without the originator realising how prevalent, popular and even profound that new term will be to an industry.

So, in 1964 when Neil Borden (then a professor of marketing at Harvard) used the term (he actually started using the term in his classes from about 1950) in his seminal article, ‘The Science of Marketing’ published in 1964, little did he know how wide the usage would be.

Even though Borden is said to be the originator of the term, he was graceful enough to attribute the first usage of the phrase to a colleague of his. He was impressed how his colleague “described the business executive as a ‘decider’, an ‘artist’ — a ‘mixer of ingredients’, who sometimes follows a recipe prepared by others, sometimes prepares his own 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”.

He continued in his article by expressing his own views on the use of the ‘Marketing Mix’: “I liked his idea of calling a marketing executive a ‘mixer of ingredients’, one who is constantly engaged in fashioning creatively a mix of marketing procedures and policies in his efforts to produce a profitable enterprise.”

The marketing mix, as proposed by Borden, had about 12 elements. But as you know no one wants to, and many are not capable of, memorizing 12 items — three or four is a nice number of things to remember.

By the way, something that all MBA students should remember when are communicating something you want people to recall, is that three or four are magic numbers. Especially since we are now looking at marketing, you will always be involved in communicating to an audience — whether physically or via some other media. So, always try not to ask people to memorise more than three or four items at a time. That is how our minds work, and the creators of stories know this — three blind mice, three musketeers, three little pigs, three wise men, etc. I think you get the picture!

So, it would have been a hard swallow to ask marketing students to memorise 12 items for a marketing mix. It took the ‘brilliance’ of McCarthy in 1960 to derive four key elements that executives could focus on when designing their marketing mix – hence the ‘4Ps of Marketing’!

So, it was nearly six decades ago that the 4Ps concept was introduced. Of note is that the 16th edition of Kotler and Armstrong’s

Principles of Marketing, that is, their most recent edition waspublished in 2015, still discusses the 4Ps of Marketing! This despite many researchers, theorists and purists seeking to either change the number of ‘Ps’, or changing the Ps to Cs or Vs!

Londhe in his 2014 Science Direct article, ‘Marketing Mix for Next Generation Marketing’, strongly believes that the 4Ps concept is now outdated. He reviewed the various attempts at replacing the 4Ps and concluded with his own proposal for the 4Vs – Validity, Value, Venue and Vogue.

Not only have there been attempts to replace the nomenclature (or naming) of the framework, there are many researchers and practitioners that think there should be additional Ps to the original four. Many have insisted on a fifth P, but have hardly been consistent. There has been the P of ‘Purpose’, and there has been ‘Profit.’ Rowan in her

Talentmgt.com article ‘The Real 5th P of Marketing’ believes that it really should be ‘People!’

Other practitioners believe, and have even adopted a 7Ps framework, adding people, processes and physical evidence to the mix (http:/

/www.professionalacademy.com). Even though popular, don’t ignore that there has also been an eighth P – ‘Productivity and Quality.’

However, despite all the forays into trying to obtain a new framework for the marketing mix, the 4Ps framework has clung tenaciously to the main textbooks that train thousands of marketers annually. This, therefore, means that the thinking and practice of marketing in terms of the marketing mix will continue to persist with the 4Ps for some time.

What is the Marketing Mix?

According to Kotler and Armstrong, “the marketing mix is the set of controllable, tactical marketing tools — product, price, place, and promotion — that the firm blends to produce the response it wants in the target market”.

The marketing mix has been one of the pillars upon which modern marketing has not only survived, but thrived. It has been a very popular tool, and a dominant concept in the practice of marketing. As I said before, earlier in the series on marketing, the overall concept of marketing could be boiled down to the creation of your market segments, then targeting the chosen segment(s), as well as the designing and operationalising of your marketing mix.

Next week we dive into the four Ps.

Dr Kenroy Wedderburn is an MBA part-time lecturer. Send your e-mails to drkwedderburn@gmail.com.