The marketing mix: why price, product and place also communicate

The marketing mix is the set of decisions a company makes to serve the customers it has chosen. Once segmentation, targeting and positioning has decided whom to serve and what position to hold, the mix decides what to offer, at what price, through which channels, and with what communication.

• Borden described the marketing manager as a "mixer of ingredients" and listed twelve of them^3, 4.
• McCarthy reduced the list to four Ps (product, price, place and promotion) in Basic Marketing in 1960; Philip Kotler adopted and popularised the model^1, 2.
• Booms and Bitner added three Ps for services in 1981: people, process and physical evidence⁵.
• Lauterborn restated the four Ps from the buyer's side as four Cs in Advertising Age in 1990^6, 7.
• For IMC, promotion is only one of the Ps, and the others communicate too.

Neil Borden of Harvard Business School set out the idea in "The Concept of the Marketing Mix", published in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1964³. He credited the image to a colleague, James Culliton, who had described the business executive as a "mixer of ingredients", someone who sometimes follows a recipe and sometimes invents one⁴. Borden's own list ran to twelve ingredients: product planning, pricing, branding, channels of distribution, personal selling, advertising, promotions, packaging, display, servicing, physical handling, and fact finding and analysis⁴.

Two things in the list matter for integrated communications. First, the communication ingredients (advertising, personal selling, promotions, packaging and display) were never separate from the rest; they sat in the same recipe as pricing and distribution. Second, the point was the blend. Oxford's textbook summary notes that the framework is still widely used under the four-P label, and that relationship marketing later challenged its picture of marketers as people who manipulate policies at customers rather than build relationships with them³.

In 1960 Jerome McCarthy grouped the ingredients into four, in Basic Marketing¹. Writing for the American Marketing Association in 2024, Kotler recalled that Borden had first listed twelve marketing tools, that McCarthy proposed the four-P mix, and that he himself adopted it and helped popularise it¹. The AMA describes the four Ps as a summary of the key factors of any marketing strategy²:

• Product what is offered, including its design, quality, features, brand, packaging and service.
• Price what the customer pays, including list price, discounts, terms and payment.
• Place how the offer reaches the customer: channels, coverage, locations, stock and logistics.
• Promotion how the company communicates: advertising, public relations, personal selling, sales promotion, and direct and digital marketing.

The four Ps line up with the four verbs of the AMA's definition of marketing (creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging value)¹²: product creates, promotion communicates, place delivers and price exchanges. The mapping is ours; it shows why communication cannot do the whole job.

A service is produced and consumed at the same time, often in front of the customer, so the four Ps leave out much of what the customer actually experiences. In a chapter of Marketing of Services, published by the American Marketing Association in 1981, Bernard Booms and Mary Jo Bitner proposed three more⁵:

• People the staff who deliver the service, and the other customers present.
• Process the procedures and flow by which the service is delivered.
• Physical evidence the setting and the tangible cues (premises, uniforms, documents, the website) through which customers judge an intangible service. Booms and Bitner stressed its influence on how customers perceive service quality⁵.

For a bank, a hotel, a clinic or a software company with a support team, these three are where most of the brand's promises are kept or broken. They are also communication: the tone of a call-centre agent and the clarity of a confirmation email are messages, whoever writes them.

In 1990, Robert Lauterborn argued in Advertising Age that the four Ps described what the seller controls, and that marketers needed to start from what the buyer experiences⁶. He restated each P as a C^6, 7:

The C that matters most for this site is the last. "Promotion" describes something done to customers; "communication" describes an exchange with them. The cost to satisfy is also wider than price, since it includes the time, effort and risk of buying and switching, and convenience is wider than distribution⁷. Kotler and Armstrong's textbook presents the four Cs as the customer's-eye view of the same decisions, not a replacement for them¹⁰.

Communications is the promotion P, which Kotler and Armstrong call the promotion mix or marketing communications mix: advertising, public relations, personal selling, sales promotion, and direct and digital marketing, blended into one programme, which is what integrated marketing communications means^10, 11. That gives communications a double job:

• Inside promotion, integrate the disciplines: one message, many channels. The foundations track covers that.
• Across the mix, make sure the other Ps say the same thing as promotion. That is where integration most often fails, because the other Ps are owned by other people.

Each P sends a message, intended or not.

• Price signals quality Zeithaml's 1988 model treats price as both a sacrifice and a cue to quality⁸. A brand positioned on craft that is permanently on promotion is telling customers two different things; see sales promotion.
• Place signals who the brand is for, and decides whether it can be bought at all The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute calls the second part physical availability: buyers being able to get the brand in the variant, quantity and price they want, alongside mental availability, being thought of in buying situations⁹. A campaign that builds mental availability where the product is hard to find wastes much of its effect. See the glossary on mental availability.
• Product and packaging are media The pack, the product design and the unboxing carry the brand's distinctive assets into every home and shelf.
• In services, people, process and physical evidence are the proof They confirm or deny the pillars of the message house⁵.

Common mistakes:

• Launching the campaign before the mix is ready Advertising a product that is not yet stocked, or a service the front line has not been trained to deliver.
• Pricing in one room, messaging in another A "premium" campaign and a trade team on deep discounts cancel each other out⁸.
• Treating the four Cs as a slogan Restating the Ps in the customer's words is useful only if a decision changes as a result⁷.

In most companies the Ps live in different places: product with a product or research team, price with finance or the commercial team, place with sales and the supply chain, promotion with marketing and its agencies, and, in services, people and process with operations and human resources. The marketing concept assumes these decisions are integrated^10, 11; organisation charts rarely are. Three arrangements help:

• One position, signed by every owner of a P The positioning is the contract between them.
• One calendar Price changes, launches, stock arrivals and campaigns on the same timeline, so a promotion never lands on a launch week by accident; the campaign calendar is built for that.
• One decision right A named person can stop a promotion or a campaign that contradicts the position. Organising for IMC and the integration RACI show how to write it down.

Before a launch, a relaunch or a major campaign, run the mix against the message house. One owner, usually the brand or product lead, should have the authority to fix what fails.

A worked example (illustrative). A boutique hotel's new campaign promises "a calm, personal stay". Run the check. Product: the rooms deliver, but the lobby is noisy at check-in time. Price: it runs a permanent "up to 40% off" banner, which says "bargain", not "personal". Place: half its bookings come through online travel agencies whose listings use stock photos and none of its words. People: front-desk staff have not seen the campaign. Process: check-in takes too long at peak hours. Physical evidence: the website matches the campaign; the confirmation email does not. The fixes, in order: brief the staff and redesign the check-in, rewrite the agency listings and the confirmation email, retire the permanent banner in favour of offers for direct bookers, and only then raise the media weight. See hospitality and travel and the product launch hub; the launch checklist carries the same questions.

• Borden's article, via Oxford's summary and a reprint^3, 4, and Kotler's account of the mix's origins for the AMA¹.
• The AMA on the four Ps² and its definition of marketing¹².
• Booms and Bitner's seven Ps, in a study that applies them⁵.
• Lauterborn's four Cs^6, 7.
• Zeithaml on price as a quality cue⁸, and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute on mental and physical availability⁹.
• Kotler and Armstrong, Principles of Marketing¹⁰, and Kotler and Keller, Marketing Management¹¹.
• Next in this track: positioning. To choose the communication disciplines for an objective, see which mix for which objective.