Marketing Mix Definition by Authors: Borden, McCarthy, Kotler

The marketing mix started as a description of judgement. It became a checklist. I think most of what goes wrong with the 4Ps today happens in that gap.

Culliton and Borden were describing a person: an executive mixing ingredients, sometimes from a recipe, sometimes inventing one. McCarthy turned that into four boxes, which made it teachable. Every textbook since has inherited both the clarity and the problem.

Here are the definitions in the order they arrived, quoted from the originals. If you want the wider picture first, start with my post on the definition of marketing by Kotler and other authors.

James Culliton (1948): the “mixer of ingredients”

In The Management of Marketing Costs (Harvard, 1948), James Culliton described the business executive as a “decider,” an “artist” and a “mixer of ingredients, who sometimes follows a recipe prepared by others, sometimes prepares his own recipe as he goes along, sometimes adapts a recipe to the ingredients immediately available, and sometimes experiments with or invents ingredients no one else has tried.”

That’s the wording as Borden quoted it in 1964. Most blogs keep the four famous words and drop the rest of the sentence. Read the rest. Half of it is about improvising: writing your own recipe, adapting to what’s available, inventing ingredients. That half is what the 4Ps later lost.

Neil Borden (1964): “The Concept of the Marketing Mix”

“If he was a ‘mixer of ingredients,’ what he designed was a ‘marketing mix.’”

Neil H. Borden, “The Concept of the Marketing Mix”, Journal of Advertising Research, Vol. 4, No. 2 (June 1964), pages 2 to 7

Borden says Culliton’s phrase “immediately appealed to me as an apt and easily understandable phrase”. You’ll often read that he introduced “marketing mix” in a 1953 address to the American Marketing Association. His own article simply says he began using the term in his teaching and writing about 15 years earlier.

His mix had 12 elements:

• Product planning
• Pricing
• Branding
• Channels of distribution
• Personal selling
• Advertising
• Promotions
• Packaging
• Display
• Servicing
• Physical handling
• Fact finding and analysis

Twelve, not four. Borden never proposed the 4Ps. Branding, packaging and servicing each had their own line. Here’s the kicker: fact finding and analysis, what we’d now call research and data, sat inside the mix as an ingredient. It wasn’t a separate department that sends a report once a quarter.

E. Jerome McCarthy (1960): the four Ps

In Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, first published in 1960, McCarthy wrote that “a marketing mix is developed next out of four ingredients, called the four P’s: Product, Place (that is, channels and institutions), Promotion, and Price.” (Wording from the book’s early editions.)

Four is easier to remember than twelve. That’s why the 4Ps won. It’s also why they get treated as a form to fill in, one box per P, which is close to the opposite of what Culliton was describing.

Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong: marketing mix definition

“The marketing mix is the set of tactical marketing tools that the firm blends to produce the response it wants in the target market.”

Philip Kotler and Gary Armstrong, Principles of Marketing (same wording across recent editions)

The version you’ll see with “product, price, place, and promotion” written inside the sentence comes from the book’s margin glossary, not the main text. Both are Kotler and Armstrong’s. Quote the one you actually mean.

“Blends” is the word I’d underline. It keeps Culliton’s idea alive inside a textbook definition.

Kotler and Keller: the modern four Ps

In Marketing Management (14th edition), Kotler and Keller credit McCarthy with the original four Ps, then say “clearly these four Ps are not the whole story anymore.” Their update, for what they call holistic marketing, is “people, processes, programs, and performance.”

Read carefully: the book presents these as a more representative set that reflects modern marketing. It doesn’t tell you to throw McCarthy’s four away.

Booms and Bitner (1981): the 7Ps for services

Bernard Booms and Mary Jo Bitner extended the mix for service businesses in “Marketing Strategies and Organization Structures for Service Firms”, published in Marketing of Services (James Donnelly and William George, eds., American Marketing Association, 1981, pages 47 to 51). The three additions credited to them are people, process and physical evidence.

One honest caveat: the original chapter isn’t openly available online, so that list comes from how later textbooks and papers describe it rather than from Booms and Bitner’s own sentences.

For anyone selling a service, these three are usually the ones that matter most. The customer can’t hold the product, so they judge the people serving them, the steps they go through and whatever they can see and touch along the way.

Bob Lauterborn (1990): the 4Cs

In Advertising Age on 1 October 1990, under the headline “New marketing litany; Four P’s passe; C-words take over”, Bob Lauterborn wrote: “It’s time to retire McCarthy’s famous Four P’s.” His replacement started with “Forget product. Study Consumer wants and needs.” The 4Cs are consumer wants and needs, cost, convenience and communication.

I read the 4Cs as the 4Ps seen from the customer’s side of the counter. Price becomes what it costs the customer. Place becomes how convenient it is to buy. Promotion becomes a conversation instead of a broadcast.

Marketing mix definitions compared

Author	Year	Source	Elements	The idea
James Culliton	1948	The Management of Marketing Costs	None listed	The executive as a “mixer of ingredients”
E. Jerome McCarthy	1960	Basic Marketing	4: product, place, promotion, price	The four Ps
Neil Borden	1964	Journal of Advertising Research	12, from product planning to fact finding	Named the “marketing mix”
Booms and Bitner	1981	Marketing of Services (AMA)	7: adds people, process, physical evidence	The mix for services
Bob Lauterborn	1990	Advertising Age	4Cs: consumer, cost, convenience, communication	The customer’s view
Kotler and Armstrong	Recent editions	Principles of Marketing	4Ps	Tools the firm blends
Kotler and Keller	14th edition	Marketing Management	People, processes, programs, performance	The four Ps updated for holistic marketing

Which Ps do you actually control?

This is where the textbook definitions and real teams part ways. Kotler and Armstrong say the firm blends the tools. In a lot of companies, the marketing team doesn’t hold all four. Product sits with a product team. Price sits with finance or sales. Place sits with operations. Marketing owns promotion, and sometimes only promotion.

That isn’t a complaint. It’s the most useful question the marketing mix can still answer for you: which of these ingredients can you change this quarter? If the answer is one, you aren’t mixing. You’re working from someone else’s recipe, which Culliton also allowed for. Just be clear about which one you’re doing, because a plan that pretends to own all four Ps will promise things nobody in the room can deliver.

Common misquotes to avoid

• Borden did not propose the 4Ps. His list had 12 elements.
• The 4Ps are McCarthy’s. Kotler’s textbooks use them and credit McCarthy.
• Culliton’s book is from 1948.
• Kotler and Armstrong’s main-text definition doesn’t list the four Ps inside the sentence. That’s the glossary version.
• Kotler and Keller’s people, processes, programs and performance update the 4Ps for holistic marketing. The book doesn’t say they replace them.
• Lauterborn’s 4Cs ran in Advertising Age in 1990, not in a textbook.

Frequently asked questions

Who gave the concept of the marketing mix?

Neil Borden named it. He took James Culliton’s 1948 description of the marketing executive as a “mixer of ingredients” and wrote: “If he was a ‘mixer of ingredients,’ what he designed was a ‘marketing mix.’” His article “The Concept of the Marketing Mix” appeared in the Journal of Advertising Research in 1964.

What is the marketing mix according to Philip Kotler?

Kotler and Armstrong define it as “the set of tactical marketing tools that the firm blends to produce the response it wants in the target market” (Principles of Marketing).

Who introduced the 4Ps of marketing?

E. Jerome McCarthy, in Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach (1960): product, place, promotion and price.

What are the 7Ps of marketing?

The 4Ps plus people, process and physical evidence, an extension for services credited to Bernard Booms and Mary Jo Bitner (1981).

What are the 4Cs of marketing?

Consumer wants and needs, cost, convenience and communication, proposed by Bob Lauterborn in Advertising Age in 1990.

Twelve ingredients became four. Four became seven for services, then four Cs from the customer’s side. The list keeps changing. The job Culliton described doesn’t: somebody still has to decide the blend, and know which ingredients are actually in their hands.

Related reading

• Marketing Definition by Philip Kotler and Other Authors
• Brand Equity Definition by Aaker, Keller, Kotler and Others
• Decoding Branding: Definitions by Kotler, Aaker, Keller, and More
• Positioning Statement Examples: Three Real Homepages, Rebuilt and Stress-Tested
• Marketing for Startups: The Lean-Team Reading Path