The ‘marketing mix (also known as the 4 Ps) is a foundation model in marketing. The marketing mix has been defined as the “set of marketing tools that the firm uses to pursue its marketing objectives in the target”. Thus the marketing mix refers to four broad levels of marketing decision, namely: product, price, promotion, and place. Marketing practice has been occurring for millennia, but marketing theory emerged in the early twentieth century. The contemporary marketing mix, or the 4 Ps, which has become the dominant framework for marketing management decisions, was first published in 1960. In services marketing, an extended marketing mix is used, typically comprising 7 Ps, made up of the original 4 Ps extended by process, people, and physical evidence. Occasionally service marketers will refer to 8 Ps, comprising these 7 Ps plus performance.
In the 1990s, the model of 4 Cs was introduced as a more customer-driven replacement of the 4 Ps. There are two theories based on 4 Cs: Lauterborn’s 4 Cs (consumer, cost, communication, convenience), and Shimizu’s 4 Cs (commodity, cost, communication, and channel).
Given the valuation of customers towards potential product attributes (in any category, e.g. product, promotion, etc.) and the attributes of the products sold by other companies, the problem of selecting the attributes of a product to maximize the number of customers preferring it is a computationally intractable problem.
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