# The marketing mix: how to read the 4Ps and 7Ps on a real B2B company Source: https://unrivals.com/blog/marketing-mix/ Site: UNRIVALS · Language: en · Updated: 2026-09-26 > The marketing mix is the map on which strategy gets executed. In a B2B company, part of the 4Ps is decided by the manufacturer, the importer or the channel. How to find out which decisions are yours, and how to build the mix around them. --- The marketing mix is the set of decisions through which a company takes its offer to the customer. In its classic form, [set out by E. Jerome McCarthy in 1960](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marketing_mix), it has four elements, known as the 4Ps: product, price, place and promotion. For service companies, the model was extended in 1981 to seven elements, adding people, process and physical evidence. When a strategy already exists, the mix shows how it reaches the market, one element at a time. When the strategy is missing, the same four boxes fill up with activities any competitor could sign off on. **TL;DR.** The marketing mix is the map on which strategy gets executed, and its practical value lies in a question the textbooks skip, namely who decides each element. In a B2B company, the product, the price or the channel are often set by the manufacturer, the importer or the partner network. That is why the mix is built starting from the elements that genuinely belong to you. You put the reason you want to be chosen on those elements, and the rest of the decisions line up around them. For the foundation behind the mix, meaning positioning, the ideal customer and the order of decisions, I wrote a separate [guide to marketing strategy for companies between 3 and 30 million euros](/blog/marketing-strategy/). Here I treat the mix as a working tool and apply it to real Romanian companies whose positioning analyses we have published. ## What is the marketing mix? The marketing mix is the combination of decisions through which a company shapes demand for its offer: what product it puts on the market, at what price, through which channels it reaches the customer and how it communicates. The term is almost eighty years old, and its origin explains better than any definition what it is for. In 1948, Harvard professor James Culliton described the marketing executive as *a mixer of ingredients*. His colleague Neil Borden picked up the image, used the phrase "marketing mix" in his 1953 presidential address to the American Marketing Association, and formalised it in an article published in 1964. Borden quotes Culliton's description almost like a job specification. The marketer is ["a mixer of ingredients, who sometimes follows a recipe prepared by others and sometimes prepares his recipe as he goes along"](https://www.deptagency.com/insight/lessons-from-marketing-classics-what-is-the-marketing-mix/), and the job is to fit advertising, selling, pricing, packaging and channels together so the business stays profitable. **The recipe prepared by others is the part textbooks leave out.** In B2B, and certainly in Romania, it describes the real situation very often. A distributor gets a good part of the recipe from the manufacturer, a car dealer gets it from the importer, and a manufacturer selling through partners depends on how those partners present its goods. McCarthy condensed the ingredients discussed in those years into four categories that are easy to remember. From the 1960s on, the 4Ps became the standard form of the mix and stayed that way in almost every marketing course, because they are easy to teach and cover all the basic decisions. In 1981, Bernard Booms and Mary Jo Bitner proposed three more elements for service companies, because a service cannot be seen before it is bought. In 1990, Robert Lauterborn rewrote the 4Ps from the customer's point of view as the 4Cs: customer needs, total cost, convenience and communication. How the marketing mix took shape
  1. 1948 · Culliton The marketer as a mixer of ingredients
  2. 1953 · Borden "Marketing mix" enters the profession's vocabulary
  3. 1960 · McCarthy The 4Ps, product, price, place and promotion
  4. 1981 · Booms and Bitner The 7Ps, for service companies
  5. 1990 · Lauterborn The 4Cs, the same decisions seen by the customer
Source · Wikipedia, Marketing mix The timeline above shows something that matters in practice. Each version of the model added decisions or changed the angle from which they are viewed, yet none of them says who the decisions are for or why the customer would pick your offer over another. **That question stays with the strategy**, and the mix can execute it well or badly without ever replacing it. The distinction sounds theoretical until you see the mix of a real company filled in with decisions it did not make itself. ## What are the elements of the marketing mix? The elements of the marketing mix are the 4Ps, product, price, place and promotion, to which services add people, process and physical evidence. The textbook definitions are simple. The difference shows up when you read them on a B2B company, where each element takes on a sharper meaning than in consumer-goods examples. **Product.** In a B2B company, the product is the result the customer obtains, and the physical item sold is only part of it. A fastener distributor sells bolts, but its industrial customer is buying a structure that passes inspection. **The product is defined by the risk the customer avoids**, and the catalogue is simply the way you deliver it. **Price.** Price tells the buyer which league you play in, on top of the amount on the invoice. It is also the element with the largest effect on profit. [Michael Marn and Robert Rosiello of McKinsey showed in Harvard Business Review in 1992](https://hbr.org/1992/09/managing-price-gaining-profit) that a 1% improvement in price, at the same volume, raises operating profit by 11.1%. The same 1% improvement yields only 7.8% when it comes from variable costs, 3.3% from volume and 2.3% from fixed costs. Their calculation rests on the average economics of 2,463 companies, so it describes the average, and any single company can land above or below it. What a 1% improvement adds to operating profit
  1. Price11.1%
  2. Variable costs7.8%
  3. Volume3.3%
  4. Fixed costs2.3%
Source · Marn and Rosiello, Harvard Business Review, 1992 The red bar explains why a discount granted to win an order costs far more than it seems at the negotiating table. **Price works on profit three times harder than volume**, and a company that sells mainly through discounts gives up exactly the lever with the largest effect. I described the mechanism at length in the [article on price wars as a perception problem](/blog/price-war/). **Place.** Place, also called distribution, covers every route by which the product reaches the customer, from warehouse and logistics to dealers, partners and the online shop. In B2B, place is often the sale itself, because a manufacturer selling through dealers wins or loses in the way those dealers present it to the customer. **Promotion.** Promotion is everything that makes the offer known and understood, from advertising and the website to trade fairs, catalogues and direct selling. It is the most visible element, which is why many companies confuse the mix with promotion and reduce the whole marketing discussion to a list of channels. In service companies, three more elements often decide the choice. I cover them separately below, because in B2B even a manufacturer sells a good part of its value as a service, through installation, technical advice and deadlines kept. ## Is the marketing mix a strategy? The marketing mix is not a strategy, it is the translation of one into execution decisions. Strategy decides who you work for, what place you want to hold in the customer's mind and why they would choose you. The mix takes those answers and turns them into product, price, channel and message. When the order is reversed, the company starts from channels and ads, and its positioning ends up being inferred from whatever worked in the last campaign. **Every element can be well made and the mix still contradicts itself**, because product, price and message pull in different directions. The right order has a well-known name, the *golden circle*, formulated by Simon Sinek. You start from the reason your company matters to the customer, move on to how you work, and only at the end reach what you sell. Our methodology requires every piece of communication to follow that order, because the reason is the part that stays in the customer's memory. The 4Ps describe, in their entirety, what you sell, which is the last step in that order. That is why they cannot, on their own, answer the question at the start, the one about why you matter. I showed what this order looks like on a five-million-euro company in the [article on the Golden Circle applied to a Romanian company](/blog/golden-circle-why/). Two ways of using the 4Ps The mix as a list of activities The mix as a map of the strategy The left-hand column describes the pattern shown by the audits in the next section. Taken on its own, no point in it is wrong. The problem appears only when you put the four decisions side by side and find that each was made by a different person with a different goal. The difference is clearest in the budget. **The marketing budget is for development, for strategy and architecture**, while optimising the same element of the mix forever, usually promotion, only moves percentages around the same average. The right strategy lowers the real cost of acquiring a customer, something a campaign tweak cannot do. I followed that money step by step in the [article on marketing budgets built on a broken foundation](/blog/marketing-budget/). The model also has a limit worth stating plainly. The 4Ps describe what you do, but they do not say why anyone should choose you, and two companies can have exactly the same mix without either one offering a reason to be chosen. That limit deserves its own discussion, dedicated to the 4Ps. ## What does a company's marketing mix look like? A company's marketing mix is easiest to read when, for each element, you separate what the company receives from others from what it decides on its own. Every positioning analysis published on unrivals.ro has a page dedicated to the 4Ps, filled in only from what is publicly visible, and five of them show the same pattern. **Autoglobus.** This car-dealer group in Timișoara sells ten brands, from BYD and Toyota to Volvo and Iveco. In the [positioning analysis we published for Autoglobus](https://unrivals.ro/deck/autoglobus) (in Romanian), the mix is split into three columns. The car, the list price, the dealer standard and the brand identity come from the importer, while promotions, the showroom and dealer campaigns are shared with the other dealers. What remains with the group is its own services, its ecosystem on Calea Șagului and the Autoglobus name. The analysis itself labels the split a hypothesis, because the exact boundary sits in the dealer contracts. The analysis concludes plainly that **the importer gives all its dealers the same product and the same price list**, and the group's name is the only thing a competitor cannot receive from the same importer. **Hexagon OA.** This fastener distributor in Ghiroda reached 63.58 million lei in turnover in 2025, according to the [analysis published for Hexagon](https://unrivals.ro/deck/hexagon), based on its public financial statements. The product comes from specialist brands such as Milwaukee, Husqvarna and Fischer, and the price is communicated through displayed discounts of 28% to 56%. Promotion relies on phrases such as "bolt warehouse" or "fair value for money", which almost any distributor could sign. The element Hexagon can own is verification. The analysis proposed turning the 60-degree thread angle and the real hardness class into a public verification rule, so that the product is defined by conformity, meaning the guarantee that the part matches its specification. **Serdim Solutions.** This distributor of cleaning products and cosmetics in Cernica lists 26 brands on its website. Four of them are registered in Serdim's name, three with the Romanian trademark office and one with the EU office, according to the [analysis published for Serdim](https://unrivals.ro/deck/serdim). On its home page, the company still presents itself through the distribution function, promising "fast delivery", and its own brands are missing from the pitch. **Divinol.** The sole authorised importer and distributor of the brand in Romania and Moldova sells more than 1,000 lubricants. Alongside them, the [analysis published for Divinol](https://unrivals.ro/deck/divinol) found a service called Fluid Management, which includes cleaning CNC machines, filtering oils and laboratory analysis. The catalogue sells lubricant, while the strategic product may be control of the fluid while the customer's machines are running. **ADF.** This window and door manufacturer has 30 years in business and its own factory, so it writes its own recipe. At the time of the [positioning audit published for ADF](https://unrivals.ro/deck/adf), both its dealer programme and its certified EI120 fire-resistance capability were invisible on the home page, even though they were the company's strongest arguments. | Company | What it receives from others | The element it can own | Where it sat at the time of the analysis | |---|---|---|---| | Autoglobus | product, list price, dealer standard | the group's name and its own services | the group's name came after the imported brands | | Hexagon OA | brands and specifications from manufacturers | verifying the conformity of parts | promotion talked about range and price | | Serdim Solutions | most brands in the portfolio | its four own brands | missing from the company's pitch | | Divinol | the DIVINOL range, as sole importer | the Fluid Management service | on a separate page, away from the home page | | ADF | nothing essential, it is a manufacturer | the dealer programme | invisible on the home page | The table shows two different situations with the same ending. Distributors and dealers receive part of the recipe from others, the situation Culliton described back in 1948, while the manufacturer writes its own. In all five cases, the element that could have set the company apart from competitors was hidden or missing from its communication. The pattern has a name in the way we work. **The proof already exists inside the company, yet it is not communicated.** The differentiator does not need inventing, because it sits in the service the company has been providing for years, in the registered and forgotten brand, or in the partner programme. Marketing work starts by bringing it into view. For the mix, the consequence is practical. There is no point optimising the elements you receive on the same terms as your competitors, because you cannot win there. **The effort goes to the element that belongs to you**, and the other elements line up around it. ## What do the 7Ps add to the marketing mix for services? The 7Ps add people, process and physical evidence to the classic mix, which are exactly the elements that decide the choice when the customer cannot test the offer before paying. In B2B, this category covers far more than consulting, because even a manufacturer sells installation, service, technical advice and deadlines kept. **People.** The salesperson, the engineer who visits the customer and the dispatcher who answers the phone are all part of the product. Their role has changed a great deal. [Gartner's research on the B2B buying journey](https://www.gartner.com/en/sales/insights/b2b-buying-journey), read in September 2026, shows that 75% of B2B buyers prefer a buying experience without a sales rep. The same Gartner research shows that self-service digital purchases end in regret more often. Buyers who use a supplier's digital tools together with a rep are 1.8 times more likely to complete a high-quality deal. **People stay in the mix, but with a different role**, that of confirming what the customer has already found out alone. **Process.** Process describes the steps a customer goes through from the first request until after the order has arrived. A good process makes the offer feel safe before signature, because the buyer can see what comes next and who is responsible for each step. I described the link between sales stages and marketing materials in the [article on building a B2B sales system](/blog/b2b-sales-system/). **Physical evidence.** For a service, physical evidence is everything that can be seen before purchase, from the website and case studies to certifications, factory photos and customer references. **This is where companies lose most often, even though the proof exists**, because it sits in the technical file or in the founder's head. At ADF, the EI120 certification appeared next to accessories, yet for a buyer looking for fire-resistant joinery it was exactly the proof they needed. At Divinol, the laboratory analyses in Fluid Management are physical evidence for a service the customer otherwise cannot see. Romanian buyers want to see before they believe, and in B2B that means samples, factory visits, technical sheets and named cases. A company that does not show its proof forces the buyer to take it on trust, and a tired buyer eventually chooses on price. ## What infrastructure does the marketing mix rest on? The marketing mix rests on four layers of infrastructure, and each element depends on a specific layer. Promotion works on the first, price, process and people on the second, data on the third, and the product and the reason to choose on the fourth. **No element of the mix can be better than the layer it stands on.** Which layer each element of the mix works on
  1. L4 · Positioning and category The product and the reason to choose
  2. L3 · AI Brain, orchestration The data that tells you what works
  3. L2 · Revenue and sales process Price, people and process
  4. L1 · Performance marketing Paid promotion and the website
The layer marked in red is the one that decides how the product is defined. If it is missing, the other three work correctly from a technical point of view, but have nothing to convey. **L1, performance marketing.** This is where ads, landing pages and everything measured in cost per click and cost per lead live. It is the part of promotion everyone sees, and the only layer the budget touches directly. **L2, revenue and sales process.** This is where price, people and process sit, meaning everything that happens after the customer has asked for a quote. A lead called back three days later, or a quote sent without context, breaks the mix even when promotion did everything right. **L3, AI Brain.** This layer shows how well the company uses its own data to decide what to change in the mix. Without it, decisions on price or channel are made on impressions, and the mix gets adjusted after the latest conversation with an unhappy customer. **L4, positioning and category.** This layer answers the question the buyer asks when comparing, namely why you. It is also where the company decides what it actually sells. Divinol can sell lubricant or fluid control, and Hexagon has to choose between bolts and conformity. The rule I apply to every new company concerns the order of these layers. **The companies that come to us rarely have a marketing problem**, because most of the time what they lack is infrastructure: systems, channels, positioning and a brand foundation. Marketing placed on a poor foundation burns money, and before any advertising we check whether channels, salespeople and a clear brand exist. The full map of the layers is in the [article on marketing architecture](/blog/marketing-architecture/). For the mix, the consequence is simple. A company is built from the bottom up, but the mix is derived from the top down, from positioning to product and only at the end to advertising. ## How do you build a marketing mix from strategy? The mix is built from the top down, starting from the reason you want to be chosen and moving down to promotion, which comes last. The order below is the one we use in our analyses, with a step the textbooks lack, namely identifying which elements belong to you. The order in which the mix is built
  1. Reason to choose The attribute you want to own
  2. The customer Who decides and what risk they want to avoid
  3. What you decide The elements of the mix that belong to you
  4. Product Defined by the customer's result
  5. Price The signal of your position
  6. Place A channel equipped to sell
  7. Promotion The same message everywhere
The link marked in red is missing from almost every textbook, even though for a distributor or a dealer it decides where the effort is worth spending. Without it, the company invests in the elements it receives on the same terms as its competitors, and then wonders why it does not stand out. **1 · The reason to choose.** The first step is the attribute you want to own in the customer's mind, phrased so that a competitor cannot sign it in the same words. For Hexagon, the analysis proposed CONFORMITY, a word that links the specification to verification and verification to lower risk for the customer. **2 · The customer.** The second step establishes who decides the purchase and what risk they want to escape. In B2B, the decision is usually made by several people, and the engineer, the finance director and the procurement lead look for different things in the same offer. I covered those differences in the [article on buyer persona versus ICP](/blog/buyer-persona-vs-icp/). **3 · What you decide.** The third step is the table from the section above, applied to your own company. **You write down, for each element, what you receive** and what you decide alone, then choose the element that will carry the attribute. For a dealer it may be the service, for a distributor verification, and for a manufacturer the channel. **4 · Product.** The product is described through the result the customer obtains and the risk they avoid. Divinol sells lubricant, but its customer is buying machines that do not stop, and Fluid Management describes exactly that result. **5 · Price.** Price confirms the position chosen in step one. A company that claims safety and displays discounts of over 50% sends two messages that cancel each other out, and the buyer believes the one easiest to check, which is the discount. **6 · Place.** In our methodology, marketing is a complete mix, online and offline, from trade fairs, flyers and billboards to cross-marketing, partners and distribution. For a manufacturer selling through dealers, **place means a channel equipped to sell**, with catalogues, technical materials and campaigns ready for every partner, so that the end customer asks for the brand by name. **7 · Promotion.** Promotion comes last and says the same thing everywhere. It works over the long term, though. [The 95-5 rule, published by LinkedIn's B2B Institute together with the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute](https://business.linkedin.com/marketing-solutions/b2b-institute/b2b-research/trends/95-5-rule), shows that 95% of potential buyers are not ready to buy today. The same research gives a direct B2B example: 80% of companies change banking services once every five years. Promotion that only talks to the 5% currently in the market misses the people who will buy next year, and when that moment comes they remember the company they understood. ## How do you check your company's marketing mix in half an hour? The check is done on a sheet with four rows, one for each element of the mix, and three columns. In the first column you write what you receive from others, in the second what you share with competitors, and in the third what only you decide. The exercise takes about half an hour, and a founder can do it alone, without a consultant. Then you put every row in the third column through the competitor test. You read the sentence and ask whether a competitor could say it word for word about their own company. **If they can, the sentence is noise**, however true it is for you, and that row moves to the second column. The element that survives in the third column after the test is where the company's attribute goes. The mix starts from there, and the other elements are given the job of not contradicting it. Price does not undermine it with discounts, the channel repeats it, and promotion states it in the same words every time. It can happen that nothing survives in the third column. That result shows that positioning is missing, the top layer on the map of layers, and the mix simply makes the gap visible. In that case, optimising the mix does not help, and the work starts with the question in the [article on brand positioning for CEOs](/blog/brand-positioning/). There is one more check, for companies whose mix already seems to work. Look at your last three lost deals and write down the real reason for each loss. If the reason is price every time, your mix is telling the market that price is the deciding criterion, and customers are simply believing you. The recipe Culliton talked about in 1948 therefore still holds. Sometimes you receive it from others, and then your job is to find the ingredient that belongs to you. Sometimes you write it yourself, and then your job is not to bury the best ingredient among the others. ## Frequently asked questions ### What is the difference between the 4Ps and the 7Ps? The 4Ps, product, price, place and promotion, are the classic mix set out by McCarthy in 1960. The 7Ps add people, process and physical evidence, proposed by Booms and Bitner in 1981 for services. In B2B, the 7Ps often fit manufacturers too, because a large part of the value is delivered as a service. ### Is the marketing mix the same thing as marketing strategy? No. Strategy decides who you work for and why the customer would choose you, and the mix translates those decisions into product, price, channel and communication. A mix built without a strategy looks complete on paper, yet every element pulls in a different direction. ### What are the 4Cs of the marketing mix? The 4Cs are the version proposed by Robert Lauterborn in 1990, which looks at the same decisions from the customer's point of view: customer needs, total cost, convenience and communication. The model is useful as a check, because it forces you to see price as a total cost and promotion as a conversation. ### How often should the marketing mix be reviewed? The mix should be reviewed when the strategy changes, when an important new customer arrives, when a new channel opens or when a supplier changes its prices. Between reviews, a quarterly look at lost deals shows whether the elements of the mix are still saying the same thing. If you want to find out which elements of your company's marketing mix really belong to you, and where its attribute should sit, [ask for a diagnostic](/#diagnostic). We show you where the reason to choose is being lost and where to start.