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The Marketing Mix Revisited: Towards the 21st Century Marketing by E.

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DOI: 10.1362/026725706776861181

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 Journal of Marketing Management, 2006, 22, 439-450

Kristian Möller1 Comment on:

The Marketing Mix Revisited:

Towards the 21st Century Marketing
by E. Constantinides

Marketing Mix Discussion -

Is the Mix Misleading Us or are We Misreading the Mix?

Theories into marketing form an important and fascinating topic. Theoretical

discussion on marketing is especially challenging as it is often difficult to
distinguish between marketing practice, generalised marketing knowledge
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manifested in text books, and “real theories” of marketing. Another aspect is

the dynamism of our discipline, since the early 1990s we have been living in
a “paradigm shift” where many scholars are saying good byes to the
“transactional marketing” and embracing the “relationship marketing”
(Grönroos 1994; Gummesson 1995; Sheth and Parvatiyar 2000; Vargo and
Lusch 2004).
So is it still worthwhile to examine the old 4 Ps Marketing Mix framework
as Constantinides does in his “The Marketing Mix revisited: Towards the 21st
Century Marketing”? I strongly believe so, for at least two reasons. First, as
Constantinides points out, the 4Ps Marketing Mix framework has been
extremely influential in informing the development of both marketing theory
and practise. Second, I think there is too little reflection on the theoretical
foundations of the normative advice found in abundance in the text books.
Although I applaud Constantinides for his effort to review and analyse the
strengths and limitations of the Marketing Mix framework, I have some
issues concerning the basic foundation of the analysis and conclusions of the
“The Marketing Mix revisited.” As I believe that these issues have general
relevance for the community of marketing scholars, I am very grateful for
this opportunity to provide a commentary. My primary aim is to examine
the Mix approach from a theoretical perspective; this involves uncovering the
cognitive goals, theoretical driving forces, underlying assumptions, and the
insights which the Mix offers to the marketing discipline. First, the goals and
premises of “The Marketing Mix revised” are discussed. Second, an
alternative view to the mix framework is presented challenging some of the

1 Correspondence: Kristian Möller, Department of Marketing, Helsinki School of

Economics, Po Box 1210, 00101 Helsinki, Finland, Email: moller@hse.fi

ISSN1472-1376/2006/3-4/00439 + 11 ©Westburn Publishers Ltd.

 440 Kristian Möller

current criticisms, exemplified especially in Grönroos (1994). Third,

conclusions derived by Constantinides are discussed and finally, suggestions
for further theoretical discussion of marketing are provided.

How to Read the Marketing Mix

Constantinides presents the following goal for his Marketing Mix paper:

“The main objective …is to present an up-to-date picture of the current

standing in the debate around the Mix as marketing paradigm and
predominant marketing management tool by reviewing academic views
and criticism originating from five marketing management sub-
disciplines: Consumer Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Services
Marketing, Retail Marketing, Industrial Marketing. Next to these
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“traditional” areas, the paper reviews the arguments as to the value of the
mix in an emerging marketing management domain, the E(lectronic)-
Marketing.”

Two questions are of importance here, (i) what is included in the “Mix as
marketing paradigm” and how is the Mix interpreted? (ii) how should we as
marketing scholars view the marketing management “sub-disciplines”?
It seems that Constantinides has a dualistic view of the basic content and
characteristics of the Marketing Mix framework. On the one hand, citing
Kotler (1967, 2003); and Webster (1992), he regards the Mix as a primarily
optimisation based theory providing suggestions of how to derive an optimal
mix of the four Ps “as controllable parameters likely to influence the
consumer buying process and decisions”; and also sees Mix as an essential
aspect of the “Managerial School of Marketing” (cf., Sheth et al. 1988).
However, this aspect is not developed further in the paper. On the other
hand, referring to e.g., Grönroos (1994); Dixon and Blois (1983); and Jobber
(2001), Constantinides views the 4 Ps Mix as a list of marketing variables
with no relation to customers and relatively void of underlying theory. This
dualism is natural in the sense that it reflects the views held by a number of
authors commenting on the Marketing Mix approach. I will, however, argue
that it is both flawed and unfruitful to examine and interpret the Marketing
Mix detached from its wider theoretical context, the Managerial School of
Marketing, as it was called by Sheth, Gardner and Garret in their study of
marketing thought (1988).
Although Constantinides must be commended for his extensive coverage
of the discussion concerning the Mix, it is a pity he did not go further beyond
the surface of the Mix discussion. That is, to identify the meta-theoretical
views held by different authors about the Mix (the intellectual goals of the
 Comment on “The Marketing Mix Revisited” 441

mix approach, its underlying ontological and epistemological assumptions,

level of analysis, and methodological tools). By comparing these to the views
and goals of the key authors developing the marketing mix approach, a more
rigorous theoretical understanding about the status of the Mix could have
been reached. For examples of theoretical comparisons of research traditions
within marketing and management, see Anderson 1986; Arndt 1985; Brodie
et al. 1997; Burrell and Morgan 1979; Coviello et al. 1997, 2002; Gioia and
Pitre 1990; Mattsson 1997; Möller 1994; Möller and Halinen 2000; Tikkanen
1996; Walker et al. 1987.
Constantinides’ idea of collecting and reviewing criticism on the
Marketing Mix approach, emanating from six different marketing fields or
“sub-disciplines” as he calls them, is excellent. It allows him to examine the
validity of the Mix in different types of contexts. This is essential as we must
realise that the Mix approach was developed in a particular historical context
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to answer managerial problems of primarily consumer mass markets. The

more the dominant features of various marketing contexts differ from the
underlying assumptions of the Mix, the less valid the approach probably is.
What concerns me is what kind of “sub-disciplinary” status are we expected
to give to the “Consumer Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Services
Marketing, Retail Marketing, Industrial Marketing, and E(lectronic)-
Marketing”? It is not clear, whether Constantinides views them as various
practical fields of marketing – involving multiple theories each - or as more
homogeneous theoretical entities? I have no problems if these are thought of
as practical fields. Regarding them as sub-theories of marketing is another
matter. This kind of thinking confuses practice and theory and is clearly
reflected in the out dated views that we need separate “theories” of say, bank
marketing, event marketing, health care marketing, project marketing,
transportation marketing, etc. To summarise, I am afraid that Constantinides
and many of the authors he cites, are misreading the Mix and consequently
drawing misleading conclusions of the Mix as well.

Rereading the 4 Ps Marketing Mix

Mix as a Customer Behaviour Oriented and Theory Based Approach for
Developing the Marketing Programme!

There seem to be 3-4 key criticisms against the Marketing Mix framework,
which cover most of the material Constantinides has collected:

• The Mix does not consider customer behaviour but is internally

oriented.
• The Mix regards customers as passive; it does not allow interaction and
cannot capture relationships.
 442 Kristian Möller

• The Mix is void of theoretical content; it works primarily as a simplistic

device focusing the attention of management.
• The Mix does not offer help for personification of marketing activities.

Instead of discussing each of these points, let us first reread the Mix as part of
the more extensive Managerial School of Marketing (MSM) to get an in depth
understanding of what the developers of the MSM and Mix tried to achieve.
First, it is important to keep in mind that the Mix is a normative theory. In
essence the developers of the MSM approach are trying to solve the following
problem: how to develop an optimal marketing mix consisting of the Product,
Place, Price, and Promotion solutions (see e.g. Kotler 1967, 1971). How can this
question be solved? It actually involves a number of important subproblems.
Optimisation requires objects and outcomes, an optimal solution for whom?
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Who are the “target customers”? One can easily recognise that optimisation
involves competing for the preferences of a set of consumers, households or
organisational buyers. What if we believe that customers have different
preferences (e.g. Smith 1956)? Then optimisation involves a customer
classification problem, how do we identify segments of customers, which have
more homogeneous preferences? How to bring in competition into the Mix
formation? We have to be able to compare how the customers, or particular
segments of customers, perceive and evaluate our offering vis-à-vis
competitors’ offerings; i.e. we have to be able to identify our market position.
How do we compete for the preferences of those segments of customers whose
needs and requirements we are interested in satisfying with our offering? We
try to differentiate our Mix so that it is more valuable for the target segment(s)
than the offers of the competitors. In sum, the deriving of an optimal marketing
Mix involves solving a market segmentation problem, being able to carry out
marketing positioning analysis, and finally being able to differentiate the Mix
from the competitors’ offers using the target customers (segment) preferences
as criteria.
How can these briefly sketched problems be solved or at least rigorously
addressed? There are two basic theories informing the Marketing Mix
approach. It is rooted in the monopolistic view of competition suggesting that
both consumer demand and marketers’ offerings are primarily heterogeneous,
that is differentiated; and that competition involves differentiating your
offering from that of the competitors using consumers’ perceptions and
preferences as a guideline (Chamberlin 1965, 1st published 1933; Dickson and
Ginter 1987; Kotler 1967, 1972). In trying to solve the problems posed by
monopolistic competition, the Marketing Mix approach relies on the principle
of marginal utility from economics and the tools provided by operations
analysis, sometimes called management science. The idea is to identify the
optimal level of marketing effort a firm should invest at a specific time in each
 Comment on “The Marketing Mix Revisited” 443

marketing mix element among its products/services, customer segments, and

market areas. This complex objective can be solved, in theory, presuming that
the relevant customer response functions (how customers react to each of the
Mix elements) can be identified. Then the optimum allocation of marketing
effort can be found through marginal utility analysis, as shown by Dorfman
and Steiner (1954). For an extensive treatment of the Marketing Mix theory, see
the “Marketing Decision Making: A Model building approach” (Kotler 1972),
and the first volume of the Marketing Management: Analysis, planning and
control (Kotler 1967).
We can now re-examine the four core criticisms of the Marketing Mix
approach summarised at the beginning of this section. First, is the Mix
internally oriented, with “explicit lack of market input in the model” and “in
sharp contrast with the Marketing Concept and Market Orientation principles
implying that marketing activities should be based on identification of
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customer needs and wants…”, as Constantinides emphasises. I agree that the

Mix, and the whole MSM is “internally oriented” in the sense that the focus is
on solving the question of deriving an optimal marketing offering (mix).
However, the Mix approach definitely shares the view of the Marketing
Concept that “marketing activities should be based on identification of
customer needs and wants”. It goes even beyond this and suggests what kind
of explicit information is needed from the customers in order to be able to carry
out customer oriented and customer preferences-based marketing, including
customer segmentation, offering differentiation and competitive positioning.
It is true, that the Mix does not contain a consumer behaviour element, being
essentially a normative theory of competitive, customer-based positioning?
However, the application of Managerial School of Marketing is in fact based on
the evolution of strong consumer behaviour research towards the end of 1960s
and early 1970s which helped to apply the propositions to be derived from the
theoretical combination of the Mix, segmentation, differentiation and
positioning. In this respect, the interpretation that the Marketing Mix
framework is clearly separate and in sharp contrast with the Marketing
Concept, is seriously mistaken and misleading, and does not receive any
grounding from the key text of the time (cf. Kotler 1967, 3-12). Kotler, for
example, explicitly regarded the Marketing Mix and market-segmentation as
key vehicles through which the marketing concept can be applied in a firm
(Kotler 1967, 12). The Mix, segmentation and positioning analysis, and product
or offering differentiation, and the techniques developed for these, form the
fundamental and integrated theory underlying the Managerial School of
Marketing (cf., the recent discussion of the marketing paradigms by Vargo and
Lusch 2004, 3).
A second point clarified is that the Marketing Mix approach is strongly
grounded on theory (see Dickson and Ginter 1987; Kotler 1972). It is very
 444 Kristian Möller

difficult to understand the way, for example Grönroos, in his influential article
“Quo Vadis, Marketing? Toward a Relationship Marketing Paradigm”,
suggests that the Mix model does not “include an integrative dimension.”
(1994, 349), or that “…its 4P’s constitute production-oriented definition of
marketing, not a market-oriented or customer-oriented one.” (1994, 350).
Grönroos’ reading of the Mix is the more mysterious as he discusses the
monopolistic theory of competition, and especially its Scandinavian version, the
so-called “parameterteori”, (Kjaer-Hansen 1945; Mickwitz 1959; and Rasmussen
1955) but does not connect these to the Mix and the larger MSM.
So far I have tried to spell out the scientific goals and the theoretical
foundation of the Mix approach. Next, a few words about its limitations. The
Mix, assuming primarily independent exchanges between marketers and their
customers, is silent about the potential buyer-seller interaction and
relationships. This is clearly a major limitation of the Mix approach. It does not
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imply, however, that the approach supports “one shot” transactional marketing
activities as many of the critics of the Mix approach postulate. On the contrary,
creating customer satisfaction and loyalty through repeated purchasing and
consumption experiences was relatively early recognised as one of the key
goals of marketing and modelled through learning effects in the so-called brand
choice/brand loyalty models (Bass et al. 1961; Kotler 1972). From this
perspective the so-called “transactional marketing,” is largely a rhetorical label
invented in the “paradigm battle” of the 1990s. It is difficult to imagine that any
marketer would intentionally try to serve each customer only once!
The second aspect, the MSM, is silent about the organisation of marketing
activities. The Mix theory does not contain any theory-based advice for
organising marketing activities. This limitation concerns, unfortunately, most
theory development within marketing. Even the Services and Relationship
marketing Schools lack theory-based principles concerning organisation,
although they pay much more attention to this issue. A third major limitation of
the 4Ps Marketing Mix is its treatment of strategic issues. Although it covers
well the product/brand and segment level issues (see Dickson and Ginter
1987), it is relatively silent about such questions of which fields and specific
markets the firm should be in and how to compete in these markets? However,
these questions concern corporate strategy and were never the primary focus of
the developers of the Mix approach.
Finally, what about Constantinides’ claim that the Mix does not cover well
the “personalisation” aspect of marketing? I am interpreting personalisation to
refer to interactive communication in using various channels varying from
person-to-person interaction to e-channels, and to varying of the message
content and channels per customer. Constantinides has obviously a strong
point here; the Mix is silent about both the content and process of
personalisation. One might, however, pose a question whether even the
 Comment on “The Marketing Mix Revisited” 445

Relationship Marketing School contains theory-based tools for deriving the

content for personalisation? I am arguing that in any deep sense, all normative
theories of marketing even in the era of services and the Internet, have to rely
on consumer behaviour theories and research for more fundamental
understanding of consumers as customers. However, as consumer behaviour
theories are not formed for building marketing programmes, we may still have
some use for the Marketing Mix approach even under the new relational
practices of interactive eMarketing.

The Usefulness of the Mix Approach in the Era of Relationships and

eMarketing?

In the situation where the Marketing Mix approach is announced as not only
obsolete (cf., the criticism in Constantinides), but even detrimental for
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marketing action (Grönroos 1994), can one seriously argue that the
Managerial School of Marketing has considerable value for managing
customer relationships in the eMarketing era? One can and one also should
do so in order to remedy the widely spread misreading of the Mix and the
MSM. Drawing on my earlier work with Aino Halinen on the theoretical
roots of Relationship Marketing (2000), I contend that the MSM provides still,
the best approach and toolkit for those marketing management decision
contexts where there exist a market of customers or a set of customer
relationships, which are characterised by market like exchange conditions.
The latter situation can be described through the following aspects (adapted
from Möller and Halinen 2000):

• There are many potential customers who form a market of potential

relationships.
• There are many marketers characterised by relatively homogeneous
offerings leading to a market characterised by (i) relatively low
interdependence between marketers and customers, and consequently
by (ii) relatively low switching costs.
• The actions of marketers and customers can relatively well be modelled
with the stimulus-organism-response view, emphasising customers’
action profiles; how they act and respond to marketers’ activities (note:
these activities themselves can be interactive or non-interactive,
personalised or non-personalised, direct or indirect; and customers can
also be active not just reactive).
• Customers and customer relationships can be classified, i.e. segmented
based on the action profiles of customers; the ultimate level is
individual ‘segments’ enabling the one-on-one marketing.
 446 Kristian Möller

Möller and Halinen (2000) argue that these conditions, which they call
“market-based relationship marketing”; cover many sectors of consumer
products and services and also some sectors of business marketing. The key
point is that even if customers are involved in longer-term exchange
relationships with one or more particular marketers, they can switch and also
do so. In a nutshell, Market-based Relationship Marketing can be
characterised as the management of the firm’s customer base, where the
major challenge is to serve large numbers of customers individually and still
profitably. The key managerial tasks concern first and foremost the internal
procedures of the company, such as planning marketing activities for regular
customers, mastering customer portfolio analyses, using databases and new
information technology to manage the customer interface, and restructuring
the marketing organisation according to RM thinking.
Under the sketched conditions, the principles of the Mix approach can be
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easily adopted for the marketing Mix optimisation – but not to the
organisational issues – even when utilising a customer programme and
eMarketing channels. To clarify this claim let us consider a situation where
the marketer (not unlike Amazon.com or Tesco) wants to personalise the way
it serves its customers, and further to evaluate the impact of different levels
of personalisation on its long-term profitability. This ambitious, but highly
relevant goal, involves at least the following subproblems: being able to
identify the product and service preferences of current and new customers;
and to identify their response functions to various promotional activities
(using price promotions, product and service bundling, and other
dimensions of offer personalisation. Note that the technical term “response
function” refers to the “value” - a word embraced by many relationship
marketing authors - the customer relates to the particular aspect of offering).
In addition to this the marketer must be able to evaluate how the
personalisation influences both the customer retention probability (in terms
of months or years of customership) and the customer’s buying behaviour.
Through these behavioural tendencies the estimation of the potential life-
time value of a customer relationship is possible, assuming that the marketer
can assess the costs of the personalisation activities.
This fictional example is obviously a typical “marketing mix” problem
although it involves aspects of customer interaction, issue of personification
per customer, and customer life-time value. The normative theoretical – and
practical – goal is still (after close 40 years since the Kotler 1967 book) to try
to derive a marketing programme that would simultaneously create and
maintain high customer satisfaction, loyalty and strong profitability. My
point is that across all conceivable marketing contexts (the Constantinides’
sub-disciplines: Consumer Marketing, Relationship Marketing, Services
Marketing, Retail Marketing, Industrial Marketing, and E(lectronic)-
 Comment on “The Marketing Mix Revisited” 447

Marketing), there exists a number of marketing management decision

problems that are essentially “Marketing Mix” or marketing programme
decisions. Although these problems may be phrased in widely different
vocabularies, (Constantinides: “original event programming”,
“convenience”, “connectivity”, “service quality”, “shop presentation”, “cost
to customers”, “relevance”…) there is always an underlying question of
through what kind of offering, including a choice of communication channels
and preferable customer interaction modes and patterns, a marketer should
try to serve its customers. This is exactly the marketing programme problem
involving the solving of segmentation (allowing segments of one when
profitable, Dibb 2001), differentiation, and positioning subproblems.
It seems that we still need rigorous discussion on the theoretical
foundations of marketing. One important aspect is to try to differentiate
between theories into marketing, generalised text book “knowledge” of
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aspects marketing, and marketing practise. Another issue is a deeper

understanding of our theoretical “schools” of marketing thought, their
disciplinary roots, core assumptions and limitations, and the questions they
are posing, as well as the answers they are providing. This is not easy as
reflected in the various interpretations of the “Marketing Mix”, but it is the
only way to claim some credibility as an academic discipline within
economic and social sciences. We must also realise that marketing practises
form such complex, multi-layered and historically evolving phenomena, that
they cannot be captured by any one school of thought as seem to be implied
by many Relationship Marketing advocates (Grönroos 1994; Sheth and
Parvatiyar 1995; Rapp and Collins 1991), and Vargo and Lusch (2004) in their
recent “new dominant logic for marketing” article espousing a customer and
service-centred view of marketing. If we accept the fact that each school can
only capture some aspects of reality, we should embrace and develop a
multidisciplinary understanding of marketing.

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About the Author

Kristian Möller, is a Research Professor at the Helsinki School of Economics,

Department of Marketing and Management. Formerly President of the
European Marketing Academy, Dr. Möller is an active member of the
academic marketing network in Europe.
Professor Möller’s current research is focused on business marketing,
strategic business nets, and on marketing capability and business strategy.
His recent articles include “Strategic Business Nets – Their Type and
 450 Kristian Möller

Management, Journal of Business Research, 2005 (and A. Rajala and S. Svahn);

“Crossing East-West boundaries: Knowledge sharing in intercultural
business networks,” Industrial Marketing Management, 2004 (and S. Svahn);
“How Does Adaptability Drive Firm Innovativeness? Journal of Business
Research”, 2004 (and M. Tuominen et al); “Use of References in Industrial
Bidding – A Decision Process Analysis.” Journal of Marketing Management, 2004
(and R. Salminen);. “Management of Hybrid Organisations: a case study in
retailing”, Industrial Marketing Management, 2003 (and L. Mitronen);
“Managing strategic nets. A capability perspective”, Marketing Theory, 2003
(and S. Svahn); “Business suppliers’ value creation potential. A capability-
based analysis”, Industrial Marketing Management, 2003 (P. Törrönen);
“Assessing Innovativeness through Organisational Adaptability: A
Contingency Approach”, International Journal of Technology Management, 2003
(and M. Tuominen et al.); “Relationship Marketing Theory: Its Roots and
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Direction,” Journal of Marketing Management, 2000 (and A. Halinen).

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