A global perspective on the marketing mix across time and space

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 mar-ketplace and its stakeholders. Over the past decade, three fundamental global drivers have emerged-advancements in technology, socioeconomic and geopolitical shifts, and envi-ronmental 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 instru-ments (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 cross-road, with opposing scenarios for its future: (i) more inter-firm collaboration versus marketing-mix protectionism, (ii) added complexity versus increased simplicity, (iii) fur-ther automation versus an increased recognition of the human touch, and (iv) local adap-tation 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.(c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).