From Marketing Mix to e-Marketing Mix: a literature overview and classification

Abstract

The marketing mix paradigm, in its famous version of the 4 Ps, went all the way through the evolution of marketing theory being object of discussion both in academic literature and managerial practice. Though it’s a fact that the 4 Ps marketing mix is a milestone of marketing theory, it is also true that the evolution of business contexts has created the need to review the “controllable factors” which form the marketing mix. The digital business represents the more recent of the business contexts and the one with the greater need for a differentiation of the mix. Throughout this evolutionary process, researchers have always been divided between the “conservatives”, who think the 4 Ps paradigm is able to adapt to the environmental changes by including new elements inside each “P”, and the “revisionists”, who affirm that the 4 Ps paradigm is obsolete and propose new paradigms. This paper aims to clarify these two different approaches to marketing mix evolution through a review of the main literature regarding e-marketing mix, focusing on the development of marketing mix theory for the digital context.