The marketing mix: from the 4Ps to the 7Ps

The marketing mix is a checklist of the decisions that shape how an offer reaches a customer. The best-known version has four parts: product, price, place and promotion. A later version for services adds people, process and physical evidence, making seven. Both are old, both are simple, and both still catch gaps that small businesses miss.

This guide explains where each version came from, what every P asks you to decide, and when to use four or seven. It ends with a worked illustration for a small brand and the mistakes to avoid.

Where the 4Ps came from

The idea of a mix is older than the Ps. Wikipedia’s article on the marketing mix traces it to James Culliton, who in 1948 described marketers as “mixers of ingredients”. Neil Borden popularised the phrase “marketing mix”, using it from the late 1940s and writing it up in a 1964 article, “The Concept of the Marketing Mix”, though he never fixed a list of ingredients.

E. Jerome McCarthy turned the idea into four headings in Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, usually dated to 1960. Philip Kotler’s textbooks later made the 4Ps standard teaching. Sources do not agree on the date of McCarthy’s book: both Wikipedia and Smart Insights give 1960 in the text but cite a 1964 edition in their references.

The four Ps, as questions

The 4Ps work best as questions you answer for one product and one target customer at a time.

• Product: What exactly are you selling? That covers features, quality, range, packaging, branding and any guarantee.
• Price: What will customers pay, and how? List price, discounts, bundles, payment terms and how the price compares with alternatives.
• Place: Where and how do customers get it? Your own website, marketplaces, retailers, wholesale, delivery options.
• Promotion: How do customers hear about it and decide? Advertising, search, social media, email, public relations, sales conversations.

The four have to agree with each other. A premium price with discount-bin packaging, or a luxury product promoted mainly through voucher sites, sends mixed signals that customers notice even if the team does not.

Why services needed three more

The 4Ps were designed when most marketing was about physical goods. Services behave differently. Wikipedia’s article on services marketing describes four characteristics. Services are intangible, so customers cannot inspect them before buying. They are produced and consumed at the same time, so the customer is present while the service happens. They vary, because people deliver them. And they are perishable: an empty appointment slot cannot be stored and sold tomorrow.

In 1981 Booms and Bitner proposed an extended mix for services, adding three Ps to the original four:

• People: everyone who takes part in delivering the service, including staff and, often, other customers. Smart Insights notes that the original label was “participants”, later renamed people.
• Process: the steps, systems and policies by which the service is delivered, from booking to follow-up.
• Physical evidence: the tangible cues that reassure a customer about something they cannot see. Booms and Bitner described it as “the service delivered and any tangible goods that facilitate the performance and communication of the service”. For an online business this includes the website, packaging, receipts and reviews.

The services article also notes that the extension changes how the first four are applied. Price for a service might mean deposits or cancellation fees. Place might mean opening hours or the reach of a video call.

When to use four and when to use seven

Use the 4Ps when you sell a physical product with little human contact after the sale, or when you need a quick, one-page view of a launch. Use the 7Ps when any part of what customers pay for is delivered by people, or when the experience of buying matters as much as the product. That covers consultancies, salons, tutoring, restaurants, software with onboarding, and most e-commerce, because delivery, returns and support are services wrapped around a product.

In practice many small businesses are a mix of both, which is why the seven-part version is the safer default. The Smart Insights guide to the 7Ps advises reviewing every element in an audit, saying it is “unwise to ignore an area unless it is completely outside your control.”

The models have critics. Wikipedia records that some scholars, Rafiq and Ahmed among them, question whether services really need a more complex mix than goods. Others prefer Robert Lauterborn’s 4Cs from 1990 (consumer, cost, convenience and communication), which restate the Ps from the buyer’s side. A practical use of the 4Cs is as a cross-check: after writing each P, ask what it looks like from the customer’s side.

An example (illustration only)

A home bakery in Manchester sells celebration cakes to order, mainly for birthdays and small weddings. The owner fills in the 7Ps for her main product, a two-tier custom cake.

The 4Ps alone would have caught the pricing and promotion issues. The last three rows are where most of her complaints and wasted hours came from: lost messages, missed allergy details, and customers unsure whether a stranger’s cake would arrive intact.

How to run a mix review

1. Pick one product and one target segment. A mix for “everyone” is too vague to act on.
2. For each P, write how it works today in one or two lines. Use what customers experience, not what the plan says.
3. Mark where the Ps contradict each other or the position you want to hold.
4. Read recent reviews and complaints and tag each one to a P.
5. Choose two or three changes, with an owner and a date for each.
6. Repeat when you launch a new product, change price, or add a channel.

Common mistakes

• Treating promotion as the whole of marketing. Promotion is one P in four, or one in seven. Problems in price, place or process are often the reason ads fail to convert.
• Filling in the Ps for the company rather than a product. Each product and segment combination needs its own mix.
• Ignoring physical evidence online. For a small online brand, reviews, packaging and the checkout page do the job a shopfront used to do.
• Listing tactics without choices. “Social media” is not a decision. “Two posts a week on Instagram aimed at gift buyers” is.
• Using the mix before deciding the target. The mix depends on who you serve, so settle segmentation and positioning first.