Critical Evaluation of Ten P’s of Marketing

Abstract

The 4 P’s of marketing — product, price, place and promotion — have provided a standard framework within which marketing strategies and programs have been built for over 60 years. The 4 P’s of marketing are the four important pillars of marketing strategy that all marketing professionals should know. These P’s play a major role in delivering the customer needs at the right time and the right place. It helps to define the marketing options in terms of price, product, promotion, and place so that your offering meets a specific customer need or demand. Though P’s of marketing is in the limelight the question is whether is it the real thing? Is it getting right to widely use this framework for marketing activities? The answer lays in the definition of, Marketing Mix, given by Philip Kotler in his book, Marketing Management (1967), as “the set of controllable variables a firm can use to influence buyer response”. This definition emphasizes on the fact that the marketing mixes are controllable variables. Since the marketing mixes are controllable variables, they need to be managed. Better the management of marketing mixes the better is the organization’s presence in the market. Over the years many other marketing related considerations (marketing mixes) have been proposed. This article is dedicated to give brief introduction of the so many P’s of marketing discerned and narrowed down to 10P’s by the author.