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The Mix has its origins in the ass’s: Neil Borden (1964) identified twelve controllable marketing elements that, properly managed, would result to a “profitable business operation”. Jerome McCarthy (1964) reduced Border’s factors to a simple fourteenth framework: Product, Price, Promotion and Place. Practitioners and academics alike promptly embraced the Mix paradigm that soon became the prevalent and indispensable element of marketing theory and operational marketing management.
The majority of marketing practitioners consider the Mix as the toolkit of transaction marketing and archetype for operational marketing planning. While empirical evidence on the exact role and contribution of the Mix to the success of commercial organizations is very limited, several studies confirm that the ups Mix is indeed the trusted conceptual platform of practitioners dealing with tactical/ operational marketing issues (SRAM and Sapience 1991; Romano and Rattling 1995; coverlet et al. 00). 1 The wide acceptance of the Mix among field marketers is the result of their profound exposure to this concept during college years, since most introductory marketing manuals embrace it as “the heart of their structure” (Jewell 1984) and identify the ups as the controllable parameters likely to influence the consumer buying process and decisions (Kettle 2003).
An additional strong asset of the mix is the fact that it is a concept easy to memorize and apply. In the words of David Jobber (2001): “The strength of the ups approach is that it represents a memorable and practical ramekin for marketing decision-making and has proved useful for case study analysis in business schools for many years”.
Enjoying large-scale endorsement, it is hardly surprising that the ups became even synonymous to the very term marketing, as this was formulated by the American Marketing Association (Bennett 1995). Next to its significance as a marketing toolkit, the Marketing Mix has played also an important role in the evolution of the marketing management science as a fundamental concept of the commercial philosophy.