What is the marketing mix, and how do the 4 Ps apply today?

The 4 Ps are the classic framework for a marketing offer:

• Product — what you sell, including features, quality, design, branding, and support. Marketing's role here is representing the customer's needs back into what gets built.
• Price — not just a number but a positioning signal. Cost-plus, value-based, competitive, penetration, and skimming are different strategies with different implications. Discounting trains customers to wait for discounts.
• Place — how it reaches the customer: direct, retail, marketplace, distributor, or digital.
• Promotion — how you communicate: advertising, content, PR, social, email, and sales enablement.

The extended 7 Ps add People, Process, and Physical Evidence for services, where the experience is inseparable from the delivery.

How it applies today: the framework remains useful precisely because it forces you past promotion. Most marketing problems presented as "we need better advertising" are actually product, price, or distribution problems, and no amount of promotion fixes them.

Note: The 4 Cs — Customer value, Cost, Convenience, Communication — are worth mentioning as the customer-centric restatement. The substance is similar; the shift in perspective from what the company does to what the customer experiences is the useful part.