valid one. A list never includes all relevant elements, it does not fit every situation, and it becomes obsolete. And indeed, marketing academics every now and then offer additional Ps to the list, since they have found the standard "tablet of faith" too limited. It is, by the way, interesting to notice that since the Four Ps were definitely canonized sometime in the early 1970s, new items to the list almost exclusively have been in the form of Ps. Advocators of the marketing mix management paradigm have sometimes suggested that service should be added to the list of Ps. This would be disastrous, because it would isolate customer service as a marketing variable from the rest of the organization, just as has happened with the Four P marketing mix variables. It would effectively counteract all attempts to make customer service the responsibility of everyone and not of a separate department only. In fact, the Four Ps represent a significant oversimplification of Borden's original concept, which was a list of 12 elements not intended to be a definition at all. Moreover, the elements of this list would probably have to be reconsidered in any given situation. McCarthy either misunderstood the meaning of Borden's marketing mix, when he reformulated the original list in the shape of the rigid mnemonic of the Four Ps where no blending of the Ps is explicitly included, or his followers misinterpreted McCarthy's intentions. In many marketing textbooks organized around the marketing mix, such as Philip Kotler's well-known Marketing Management, the blending aspect and the need for integration of the Four Ps are discussed, even in depth, but such discussions are always limited owing to the fact that the model does not explicitly include an integrative dimension. In the 1950s in Europe, researchers within the so-called Copenhagen School approached marketing in a similar way to the notion of the marketing mix, based on the idea of action parameters pr...
