Marketting Mix

The term Market Mix Modeling was developed by Neil Borden who first started using the phrase 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).

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...