A global perspective on the marketing mix across time and space
本文探讨了技术、社会经济和环境三大全球驱动力如何重塑营销组合，分析了其参与者、工具、实施和部署四方面的演变，并提出了未来研究的四个关键矛盾。
The marketing mix (MM) is an integral part of a firm’s marketing strategy sitting at the nexus between a company and the marketplace. As such, it evolves together with the marketplace and its stakeholders. Over the past decade, three fundamental global drivers have emerged—advancements in technology, socioeconomic and geopolitical shifts, and environmental changes—that have caused major ongoing and intensifying evolutions in the marketplace, its stakeholders, and, in turn, the MM. We describe the resulting evolutions in the MM along four central questions: who is involved in the MM, what constitutes the MM, how is it implemented, and where is it deployed. We identify a blurring of roles and responsibilities relating to the MM (who), an extension and integration of the MM instruments (what), an increase in customization and fragmentation of its actions (how), and a growing recognition of emerging-market idiosyncrasies (where). Taking a look into the future, we observe that along each of the four dimensions, the MM has arrived at a crossroad, with opposing scenarios for its future: (i) more inter-firm collaboration versus marketing-mix protectionism, (ii) added complexity versus increased simplicity, (iii) further automation versus an increased recognition of the human touch, and (iv) local adaptation versus global uniformity in the marketing mix. Applying a contingency approach, we derive relevant moderators for these forthcoming evolutions and provide an extensive set of future research questions.