The Marketing Mix

In the early 1960s, Professor Neil Borden of the Harvard Business School identified a
number of company performance actions he believed influenced the consumer decision to
purchase goods or services. Borden suggested that these actions represented a Marketing
Mix, which he published in a Harvard Business Review article. Professor E. Jerome
McCarthy, a contemporary colleague also at the Harvard Business School, then took Bordens
work forward and suggested that the Marketing Mix could be summated into four elements:
product, price, place and promotion. Thus was codified the famous four Ps (4Ps) which have
gone on to become perhaps the most famous term in marketing to date.
As with any mix the concept is straightforward; it provides a list of basic elements whose
proportions can be altered to produce a variety of mix with different outcomes, e.g. cement
as opposed to mortar, bread as opposed to cake. In fact to illustrate this lets think about a
cake mix. All cakes contain eggs, milk, flour, and sugar. However, you can alter the final cake
by altering the amounts of mix elements contained in it. So for a sweet cake add more sugar,
for a fruit cake add fruit, chocolate cake add chocolate.
Exactly the same principles apply with the marketing mix. The offer you make to you
customer can be altered by varying the mix elements. So for a high profile brand, increase the
focus on promotion and desensitize the weight given to price. For a luxury item you control
distribution Place optimise the quality product - and quite probably maximise the price.
Co-ordinating the decisions is based on marketing research and results in a marketing plan; a
blueprint to optimise the use of the businesss resources to maximise the satisfaction to the
customers and the gains of the business.
There are major differences when it comes to services marketing versus the marketing of
tangible products. The aim differences include:
1. The buyer purchases are intangible, you gain ownership of nothing
2. The service may be based on the reputation of a single person or entity, so branding
becomes vital

3. It's more difficult to compare the quality of similar services, there isnt a list of
Features and attributes you can easily compare
4. The buyer cannot return the service; the act of purchase is the act of consumption
These differences mean that there are new elements in the marketing mix; in fact there are
three new elements so we call this the 7Ps or Extended marketing mix.
Lets think about a service Car Insurance. In terms of the 4Ps you own a right to
compensation if in any sort of accident thats the product. You know the price and indeed
all the other elements of price that might be included, e.g. payment by installment. The Place
was done either indirectly through the mail as an automatic renewal, or directly by you
contacting the insurance company. Promotion could have been via any of the means listed
later in this chapter. But does that cover all the elements that went into your decision to buy
car insurance?
In fact for services the additional 4Ps of the 7P extended marketing mix consist of People,
Physical evidence, and Process. In our car insurance example, you might have spoken to a
salesperson in your home or a broker; you might have spoken to a customer service person by
phone, or at a branch office. You might have been impressed by industry reports or experts,
this could have even been online, or by the quality of the documents you received or even by
the way the person you spoke to sounded or were dressed. All of these start to bring Physical
evidence into play which often overlaps into the Place and People elements.
Finally and perhaps in a world dominated by distance purchasing via electronic media such as
the internet and telecommunications the speed, accuracy responsiveness, and reliability of the
processes in respond to you as a customer and also vital. You only have to think about how
many times you abandon a web site if its slow to appreciate how vital processes are within
the extended marketing mix. Service marketing also includes the concept of servicescape
referring to but not limited to the aesthetic appearance of the business from the outside, the
inside, and the general appearance of the employees themselves; in essence the concept of
servicescape underlines the interrelated nature of several elements of the 7Ps when viewed
from a customer perspective it is a marketing concept philosophy approach.

Service Marketing has been rapidly gaining ground in the overall spectrum of marketing and
particularly as a focus of marketing education as the developed economies move farther away
from industrial importance to service oriented economies. This can also be seen in developing
economies, where the shift to services means a shift away from customer decisions based on
tangible FABs to intangible service elements.
In many services marketing is rapidly moving into the experiential, with an emphasis on
quality of experience and feedback. This has given rise to the phrase "Managing the
evidence", which refers to the act of informing customers that the service encounter has been
performed successfully by us and how was it for you. It is best done in subtle ways like
providing examples or descriptions of good and poor service that can be used as a basis of
comparison. The underlying rationale is that a customer might not appreciate the full worth of
the service if they do not have a good benchmark for comparisons.