Who developed the concept of the marketing mix, and what each person actually added

The concept of the marketing mix was developed by Neil H. Borden, professor of advertising at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, who used the term from the late 1940s, introduced it to a wider audience in his 1953 presidential address to the American Marketing Association, and set it out in print in his 1964 article "The Concept of the Marketing Mix" in the Journal of Advertising Research. Borden credited the idea to a colleague, James Culliton, who in 1948 described the marketing executive as a "mixer of ingredients". The familiar four Ps version, Product, Price, Place and Promotion, is a later reorganisation by E. Jerome McCarthy in his 1960 textbook Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach.

So the question has two correct answers depending on what is being asked. Who developed the concept: Borden. Who gave it the shape taught today: McCarthy. Below is the sequence, what each person actually contributed, and why the version that won looks nothing like the original.

1948: the mixer of ingredients

Culliton was studying marketing costs at Harvard and needed a way to describe why two companies selling similar things spent their money so differently. His description of the marketing executive as a mixer of ingredients, published in The Management of Marketing Costs in 1948, is the first known use of the mixing metaphor in this context. It was an observation about variety rather than a model, which is precisely why it travelled: a mix implies the proportions are a choice.

Borden: the concept, and a list of twelve

Borden took the metaphor and built a concept on it. His point was that marketing results come from the combination of decisions a firm makes rather than from any one of them, and that the right combination differs by firm, by market and by moment.

What is worth knowing, because almost nobody is taught it, is that Borden's own mix was not four of anything. His outline listed twelve elements: product planning, pricing, branding, distribution channels, personal selling, advertising, promotions, packaging, display, servicing, physical handling, and fact finding and analysis. He declined to fix the list, noting that another student of the subject might assemble a different one. The record of his work and the history of the mix both set out that longer list.

Read his twelve against the modern four and you can see what the four Ps did. Packaging, branding and servicing were folded into Product. Distribution channels and physical handling became Place. Personal selling, advertising and promotions became Promotion. Fact finding and analysis, the twelfth, fell out of the model altogether, which is the one loss worth noticing.

1957 to 1962: the schemas that did not stick

Borden's concept was accepted long before the profession agreed on its contents, and several structures competed. John Howard proposed four groups in 1957, covering product, price, channel and promotion. Albert Frey, in 1961, split the offering from the methods and tools used to sell it. Lazer and Kelly, in 1962, proposed a goods mix, a distribution mix and a communication mix. Each is a reasonable organisation of the same material, and none of them is remembered outside the literature.

1960: McCarthy, and why four words beat twelve

McCarthy's Basic Marketing grouped the decisions into Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Philip Kotler's textbooks then carried the four Ps to a global student audience, and the form became the standard.

The reason it won is worth a paragraph, because it explains both the model's usefulness and its limits. Four categories can be held in the head, written on a whiteboard and used to audit a plan in an afternoon. Twelve cannot. The four also map onto the way a firm is actually organised, so each P has an owner. The cost is that a four box model invites people to tick four boxes, when Borden's argument was about proportion and fit rather than coverage.

Year	Who	What they contributed	Where
1948	James Culliton	The marketer as a "mixer of ingredients"	The Management of Marketing Costs
1953	Neil H. Borden	The concept presented to the profession	Presidential address, American Marketing Association
1960	E. Jerome McCarthy	The four Ps grouping	Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach
1964	Neil H. Borden	The concept in print, with his twelve elements	Journal of Advertising Research
1981	Booms and Bitner	People, Process and Physical evidence, for services	Marketing Strategies and Organization Structures for Service Firms
1990	Robert F. Lauterborn	The four Cs: consumer, cost, convenience, communication	Advertising Age

The additions and the rewrites

Booms and Bitner added People, Process and Physical evidence in 1981 to handle services, where the staff, the sequence and the tangible signals are the product as far as the customer is concerned. That gives the seven Ps used throughout service marketing.

The other direction of travel restates the mix from the buyer's side. Koichi Shimizu proposed a four Cs model, commodity, cost, channel and communication, in 1973, later extended into a seven Cs compass. Lauterborn published a different four Cs, consumer, cost, convenience and communication, in Advertising Age in 1990 under the title "New Marketing Litany: Four Ps Passe: C-Words Take Over". Both are the same decisions renamed from the outside in, and both are a useful discipline when a four P plan has started to read like an internal document.

If the question is on an exam paper

Write Neil Borden, with the year 1964 for the published article, and add the two sentences that show you know the rest: that Borden credited Culliton's 1948 metaphor, and that the four Ps formulation came from McCarthy in 1960. An answer that names only McCarthy has answered a different question, and an answer that names Kotler has named the populariser rather than either author.

Borden, McCarthy, Kotler and the dates that get mixed up

Who coined the actual phrase "marketing mix"?

Borden is credited with coining and popularising it, by his own account after reading Culliton's description of marketers as mixers of ingredients. Culliton supplied the metaphor, Borden supplied the term and the concept built on it.

Did Borden propose the four Ps?

No. Borden's own outline ran to twelve elements and he deliberately left the list open. The four P grouping is McCarthy's, from 1960.

Was it Philip Kotler?

Kotler is the reason most of the world knows the model, through his textbooks, and he extended the thinking considerably. The concept is Borden's and the four P form is McCarthy's.

Why do different books give different years?

Because there are several defensible dates for one story: 1948 for Culliton's metaphor, the late 1940s for Borden's first use of the term in teaching, 1953 for the address, 1960 for McCarthy's grouping and 1964 for Borden's published article. A citation is only wrong when it attaches the wrong year to the wrong event.

Is the model still worth using?

Yes, as a consistency check rather than a checklist, which is how Borden meant it. Our guide to the marketing mix, the four Ps and the seven Ps sets out the decisions inside each one and a template to fill in.

What happens to attribution when a machine answers the question

This page exists because a simple question has a layered answer, and the layers are where the credit sits. That is worth thinking about now, because the way people get answers to questions like this one has changed. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity who developed the marketing mix and you get a single confident paragraph, usually with one name, sometimes with a source link and often without one. The nuance that took Borden, Culliton and McCarthy three separate contributions arrives as one sentence.

The same flattening applies to questions about your own field and your own company. One answer, two or three sources named, everybody else absent. Which sources get named for the foundational questions in your category is observable, and it is worth observing: it tells you whose material those systems are reading when somebody asks the question your business should be the authority on. That is a measurement rather than a mystery: put the question to each assistant, in the words a student or a buyer would use, and write down who gets the credit. AI Knows Us was built to keep that record for a list of questions you nominate.