The Marketing Mix Revisited: Towards the 21st Century Marketing

The paper assesses the current standing of the 4Ps Marketing Mix framework as the dominant marketing management paradigm and identifies market developments, environmental changes, and trends, as well as changing academic attitudes likely to affect the future of the Mix as theoretical concept and also the favourite management tool of marketing practitioners. It reviews the criticism on the 4P's emanating from five "traditional" marketing areas - Consumer Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Services Marketing, Retail Marketing, Industrial Marketing - and the emerging field of Electronic Marketing. The paper identifies two main limitations of the Marketing Mix as management tool, common in all examined domains, namely the model's internal orientation and lack of personalisation. It also identifies several area-specific limitations and underlines the need for further research on the issue. The weaknesses identified in the study seem to support the frequently expressed suggestion that marketing scholars should focus their efforts in formulating the conceptual foundations and marketing methodologies that better address the needs of today's and tomorrow's marketer.