Marketing management: applying the concept of the mix in the food sector – case studies

Citation

Paul Dana, L. (2001), "Marketing management: applying the concept of the mix in the food sector – case studies", British Food Journal, Vol. 103 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/bfj.2001.070103baa.002

Marketing management: applying the concept of the mix in the food sector – case studies

INTRODUCTIONMarketing management: applying the concept of the mix in the food sector – case studies

One of the key concepts within the marketing literature remains the "marketing mix". This notion, popularized by Neil H. Borden (1964), draws on a metaphor of the business executive as a:

… "decider", an "artist" – a "mixer of ingredients", who sometimes follows a recipe as he [sic] goes along, sometimes adapts a recipe to the ingredients immediately available, and sometimes experiments with or invents ingredients no one else has tried (Culliton, cited in Borden (1964)).

An unexamined elaboration of this metaphor, the way in which the chef is able to "balance" the various ingredients, to achieve a palatable dish, remains unexplored. This lack provided the impetus behind this Special Issue.

The original notion of the marketer as a mixer of ingredients strongly suggests that marketing was (and remains) a craft. As practitioners within the craft, managers require both the tools of the craft and the devices to guide them in the use of those tools in their everyday operations. However, the use and effectiveness of particular devices by managers remain little explored. Matrix schemata have always been a popular device in the field of business and are conventionally used by academics and practitioners in the development and interpretation of strategy and tactics in marketing. While the strategic schemata have attained the status of dogma (the Boston Box, for example), the tactical level and use of the marketing mix have never reached such heights, apart from an occasional stress on the need for the "blending" of ingredients.

As marketing has developed in the food sector, numerous definitions have been offered. Today there are several different, authoritative and accepted definitions. The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) and the American Marketing Association (AMA) define marketing as:

Marketing [management] is the process of planning and executing the conception of pricing, promotion, and distribution of ideas, goods and services that satisfy organisational objectives (Fifield and Gilligan, 1996, p. 2).

A clear understanding of the development of the matrix approach from the level of strategy to tactics in marketing is the essence of the published works.

The marketing mix concept seems relatively simple. Since Culliton (1947) first carried out his study (amongst the major US companies of his time), the notion of managers within the marketing function as "mixers of ingredients" has enjoyed wide currency. Culliton's study included a full examination of a number of case histories and the use by the participating companies of marketing ingredients. Borden (1964) expanded this work to a formal use of the term "marketing mix" and he presented a list of mix constituents, based on Culliton's work. These developments were taken further by McCarthy (1975) in terms of simplification and classificatory order as the famous 4Ps. It is now just over 30 years since McCarthy provided this gloss on Borden's work and offered a generic marketing mix (product, price, promotion and place) as a means of translating marketing planning and tactics into practice (Bennett, 1997, p. 151).

This eventually led to Kotler (1997, p. 92) defining the mix as being "a set of marketing tools that a firm uses to pursue its objectives". Thus, ingredients become tools and the analogy changes.

McCarthy's 4Ps classification of the marketing mix variables has received acceptance in past decades (McCarthy, 1975). However, in recent years increasing criticism has been voiced in academic circles (Van Waterschoot, 1992, p. 83). It is believed by some academics that this paradigm is beginning to lose its position (Grönroos, 1992; 1994; Sheth, 1988). It is sometimes called "traditional" or out-dated (Ellis, 1993; Shimpock-Viewg, 1993; Collier, 1991; Lane, 1988; Turnbull, 1987). Over the past few years, it has been argued that marketing is concerned not just with the 4Ps, but also with less controllable variables (or ingredients or tools) such as people, processes and service evidence in addition to the various elements associated with each of the "original" 4Ps (Rafiq, 1995). However, the shifts from ingredients to tools to variables hints at an underlying confusion as to the conceptual status of the artifacts described.

Borden's work has the merit that his classificatory schema derives directly from empirical evidence. Borden reflected this basis when he identified the need to record within case studies evidence of what was being mixed in the marketing domain. Later extensions do not, by and large, have this merit. There have been no published studies which replicate Culliton's original work. Extensions to the mix (the conceptual device contributed by Borden) and the distilled formulation of the mix offered by McCarthy rely on conceptual processes only. The nature of the extensions seems clear, but they rest on different assumptions about how the world of the marketing manager should be constructed. This Special Issue draws on several case studies of the world of marketing managers and a test of the framework within that world as its modus operandi. It thus is placed in the tradition established by Culliton in his pioneering work. Unlike Culliton it does not flow from a considered execution of a single research design, but has emerged in the search for consistency in marketing management, as pursued with the managers themselves.

In working with managers from a range of companies in the food sector, it became clear that, while the notion of the marketing mix was intuitively acceptable to them, they had few if any mechanisms for considering systematically the elements of the mix. In response to an occasionally expressed need for a device or framework to overcome this difficulty, the MIXMAP model was developed.

The view was that such a framework provided a useful heuristic device of considerable explanatory power. The focus of this Special Issue is the attempt to demonstrate, through a series of case-based applications, that the model does provide a tool useful to managers. Further, that it is able to do this because it represents a distillation from practice, in the manner of Culliton's original description of marketeers as "mixers of ingredients". The Special Issue can thus be seen as an attempt to provide a repertoire for the cuisine of marketing in practice.

A series of case studies here presented indicates how the use of heuristic devices can theoretically aid the food marketing manager.

Leo Paul DanaDepartment of Management, University of CanterburyChristchurch, New Zealand

References

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