Kellogg on Marketing, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 2The Fall of the Four Ps and the Rise of Strategic Marketing

Alexander Chernev and Philip Kotler

As a fundamental business discipline, marketing for many years has been lacking a clear strategic foundation to provide managers with an overarching rationale to guide their marketing actions. Instead, the scope of marketing has been relatively narrow, focusing on issues that are tactical in nature without necessarily considering their underlying strategic purpose. As a result, managers often think of marketing in terms of the four Ps—the four attributes that define the company's offering—without addressing the issue of whether and how these attributes will create value in the market in which the company aims to compete. In this chapter, we suggest that this is a rather myopic view of marketing and advance a strategic approach to marketing management that should guide all of a company's market actions.¹

The Four Ps and the Seven Ts

One of the key concepts in marketing is that of the marketing mix, which refers to the attributes defining a company's offering. The term “marketing mix” stems from the notion that when creating a company's offering, a manager is faced with several key decisions that determine this offering's success or failure in the market. This view is based on the belief that there are several main types of marketing variables defining a company's offering and that a manager's role is to create the perfect combination of these variables that will appeal ...