hers in large parts of the academic world it seems to remain the marketing truth even today. Kent refers to the Four Ps of the marketing mix as "the holy quadruple...of the marketing faith...written in tablets of stone" . For an academic researcher looking for tenure and promotion, to question it has been to stick out his or her neck too far. Prospective authors of textbooks, who suggest another organization than the Four P solution for their books, are quickly corrected by most publishers. As a result, empirical studies of what the key marketing variables are, and how they are perceived and used by marketing managers, have been neglected. Moreover, structure has been vastly favoured over process considerations. In marketing education, teaching students how to use a toolbox has become the totally dominating task instead of discussing the meaning and consequences of the marketing concept and the process nature of market relationships. Marketing in practice has to a large extent been turned into managing this toolbox instead of truly exploring the nature of the firm's market relationships and genuinely catering to the real needs and desires of customers. How Did the Marketing Mix Emerge? A paradigm like this has to be well founded by theoretical deduction and empirical research; otherwise much of marketing research is based on a loose foundation and the results of it questionable. The marketing mix developed from a notion of the marketer as a "mixer of ingredients". The marketer plans various means of competition and blends them into a "marketing mix" so that a profit function is optimized, or rather satisfied. The "marketing mix", concept was introduced by Neil Borden in the 1950s (e.g.[40]), and the mix of different means of competitions was soon labelled the Four Ps.The marketing mix is actually a list of categories of marketing variables and, to begin with, this way of defining or describing a phenomenon can never be considered a very...
