Marketing mix management paradigm has dominated marketing since 1940s and McCarthy (1964) further developed this idea and refined the principle to what is generally known today as the 4Ps. However, in the post dot-com boom,marketing managers are learning to cope with a whole host of new marketing elements that have emerged from the online world of the Internet. In some ways these new marketing elements have close analogs in the offline world, and yet from another perspective they are revolutionary and worthy of a new characterisation into the E-Marketing mix (or the e-marketing delta to the traditional marketing mix) (Kalyanam and McIntyre, 2002).
Marketing mix used by a particular firm will vary according to its resources, market conditions and changing needs of clients. The importance of some elements within the marketing mix will vary at any one point in time. Decisions cannot be made on one element of the marketing mix without considering its impact on other elements (Low and Kok, 1997).As McCarthy (1960) pointed out that “the number of possible strategies of the marketing mix is infinite.
Even number of criticisms on 4Ps, however, it has been extremely influential in informing the development of both marketing theory and practise. There is also too little reflection on the theoretical foundations of the normative advice found in abundance in the text books (Möller, 2006). Marketing mix was particularly useful in the early days of the marketing concept when physical products represented a larger portion of the economy. Today, with marketing more integrated into organisations and with a wider variety of products and markets, some authors have attempted to extend its usefulness by proposing a fifth P, such as packaging, people and process. Today however, the marketing mix most commonly remains based on the 4 P’s.