Marketing Mix Essay Research Paper Has today

Marketing Mix Essay, Research Paper

Has today’s dominant marketing mix paradigm become a strait-jacket.

A relationship building and management approach may be the answer. The marketing mix management paradigm has dominated marketing thought, research and practice since it was introduced almost 40 years ago. Today, this paradigm is beginning to lose its position. New approaches have been emerging in marketing research. The globalization of business and the evolving recognition of the importance of customer retention and market economies and of customer relationship economics, among other trends, reinforce the change in mainstream marketing. Relationship building and management, or what has been labelled relationship marketing, is one leading new approach to marketing which eventually has entered the marketing literature. A paradigm shift is clearly under way. In services marketing, especially in Europe and Australia but to some extent also in North America, and in industrial marketing, especially in Europe, this paradigm shift has already taken place. Books published on services marketing and on industrial marketing as well as major research reports published are based on the relationship marketing paradigm. A major shift in the perception of the fundamentals of marketing is taking place. The shift is so dramatic that it can, no doubt, be described as a paradigm shift. Marketing researchers have been passionately convinced about the paradigmatic nature of marketing mix management and the Four P model. To challenge marketing mix management as the basic foundation for all marketing thinking has been as heretic as it was for Copernicus to proclaim that the earth moved. The purpose of this report is to discuss the nature and consequences of the dominating marketing paradigm of today, marketing mix management of the managerial school and how evolving trends in business and modern research into, for example, industrial marketing, services marketing and customer relationship economics demand a relationship-oriented approach to marketing. Relationship building and management are found to be an underlying facet in the research into these areas. Relationship marketing is suggested as one new marketing paradigm, and a number of consequences for marketing and management of a relationship-type marketing strategy is discussed based on the notion of a marketing strategy continuum. Finally, the possibility of building a general theory of marketing based on the relationship approach is examined. A further discussion of the nature of the relationship marketing paradigm is, however, beyond the scope of this report. Marketing Mix and the Four Ps Marketing the way most textbooks treat it today was introduced around 1960. The concept of the marketing mix and the Four Ps of marketing – product, price, place and promotion – entered the marketing textbooks at that time. Quickly they also became treated as the unchallenged basic model of marketing, so totally overpowering previous models and approaches, such as, for example, the organic functionalist approach advocated by Wroe Alderson as well as other systems-oriented approaches and parameter theory developed by the Copenhagen School in Europe that these are hardly remembered, even with a footnote in most textbooks of today. Earlier approaches, such as the commodity , functional , geography-related regional and institutional schools have suffered a similar fate. Only a few models from these approaches have survived. American Marketing Association, in its most recent definition, states that “marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchange and satisfy individual and organizational objectives” (emphasis added). Eventually the Four Ps of the marketing mix became an indisputable paradigm in academic research, the validity of which was taken for granted. For most marketing researchers in large parts of the academic world it seems to remain the marketing truth even today. Kent refers to the Four Ps of the marketing mix as “the holy quadruple…of the marketing faith…written in tablets of stone” . For an academic researcher looking for tenure and promotion, to question it has been to stick out his or her neck too far. Prospective authors of textbooks, who suggest another organization than the Four P solution for their books, are quickly corrected by most publishers. As a result, empirical studies of what the key marketing variables are, and how they are perceived and used by marketing managers, have been neglected. Moreover, structure has been vastly favoured over process considerations. In marketing education, teaching students how to use a toolbox has become the totally dominating task instead of discussing the meaning and consequences of the marketing concept and the process nature of market relationships. Marketing in practice has to a large extent been turned into managing this toolbox instead of truly exploring the nature of the firm’s market relationships and genuinely catering to the real needs and desires of customers. How Did the Marketing Mix Emerge. A paradigm like this has to be well founded by theoretical deduction and empirical research; otherwise much of marketing research is based on a loose foundation and the results of it questionable. The marketing mix developed from a notion of the marketer as a “mixer of ingredients”. The marketer plans va