conomics demand a relationship-oriented approach to marketing. Relationship building and management are found to be an underlying facet in the research into these areas. Relationship marketing is suggested as one new marketing paradigm, and a number of consequences for marketing and management of a relationship-type marketing strategy is discussed based on the notion of a marketing strategy continuum. Finally, the possibility of building a general theory of marketing based on the relationship approach is examined. A further discussion of the nature of the relationship marketing paradigm is, however, beyond the scope of this report. Marketing Mix and the Four Ps Marketing the way most textbooks treat it today was introduced around 1960. The concept of the marketing mix and the Four Ps of marketing - product, price, place and promotion - entered the marketing textbooks at that time. Quickly they also became treated as the unchallenged basic model of marketing, so totally overpowering previous models and approaches, such as, for example, the organic functionalist approach advocated by Wroe Alderson as well as other systems-oriented approaches and parameter theory developed by the Copenhagen School in Europe that these are hardly remembered, even with a footnote in most textbooks of today. Earlier approaches, such as the commodity , functional , geography-related regional and institutional schools have suffered a similar fate. Only a few models from these approaches have survived. American Marketing Association, in its most recent definition, states that "marketing is the process of planning and executing the conception, pricing, promotion and distribution of ideas, goods and services to create exchange and satisfy individual and organizational objectives" (emphasis added). Eventually the Four Ps of the marketing mix became an indisputable paradigm in academic research, the validity of which was taken for granted. For most marketing researc...
