History and evolution of the marketing mix

We’ve learned that the marketing mix is made up of 4Ps and must be harmonized with the target, but we’re now seeing 5Ps, 7Ps and even 10Ps. Let’s take a look at the evolution, but also the redundancies and inconsistencies.
As the P’s are derived from English, we’ll put the French equivalents beginning with a P.

4P

It’s the classic marketing mix we learned in business school and still apply to our business:

• Product: this is what is sold to the customer, incorporating the physical product, but also what goes with it, i.e. the service.
• Price: must be in line with the product. There’s no point in selling a Rolex at a low price, as this would only devalue it or make people fear that it’s a copy.
• Place = set up, i.e. distribution channel and sale
• Advertising – Promotion: all push (promotion) and pull (advertising) marketing actions designed to increase product sales.

5P

• People = people, i.e. customer service, but also the people who take care of them. The 5P has the merit of highlighting customer relations, but purists agree that it was included in the 4P’s notion of product.

7P

• Process = procedure, i.e. interaction with the customer, the stages in the customer relationship and all the key points that can make a difference.
• Physical evidence = the contractual relationship with the customer, the tangible link we have with them. Some large companies have implemented a customer promise, a service charter that they respect, measure and communicate.

8P

• Partnership = Partnership with the customer. We go beyond the contractual notion to propose a win-win partnership with the customer. However, even if these partnerships are proposed and announced, we may well wonder whether the interests of a telephone company’s shareholders are the same as those of its consumers. Apart from the announcement effect, is there a real partnership between entities so powerful on the one hand and so weak on the other?

9P

• Permission: do we have the customer’s permission to solicit them? Consumers are becoming exasperated by the harassment they have to deal with: phone calls at home, recurring ads displayed on the Internet as soon as they’ve visited a site (remarketing), targeted ads on their Facebook. Some believe that the future is more about Pull than Push marketing. Basically, it’s better to appear at the top of search engines at the moment they want to make a purchase, than to harass them with paid advertising on social media.

10P

• Purple cow = the ability to be seen and to stand out in the ocean of information we have to deal with, especially on the Internet, it’s the art ofarriving in the first position of search engines. Your website may be beautiful, but your tree, no matter how beautiful, is useless if it’s lost deep in the Amazon rainforest. Celebrities understand this and invent scandals to get themselves talked about and … to exist. That’s what we call creating buzz.

In conclusion

Some see new P’s, like Passion and Power, each of which corresponds to a current trend, but the excess of P’s destroys the concept itself and the simplicity that was its strength. All the new P’s are simply variations on the original 4P’s. Of these new P’s, at least five are intended to characterize different, sometimes utopian, aspects of customer relations.
Clearly, web marketing will redefine a new marketing mix, but it will only modify the application of the major existing concepts.
To keep the concept simple and effective, you need to stick to 5P’s or 6P’s at most, otherwise you destroy the concept itself.

Jean-Pierre Mercier

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