<P> Given the valuation of customers towards potential product attributes (in any category, e.g. product, promotion, etc .) and the attributes of the products sold by other companies, the problem of selecting the attributes of a product to maximize the number of customers preferring it is a computationally intractable problem . </P> <P> The origins of the 4 Ps can be traced to the late 1940s . The first known mention of a mix has been attributed to a Professor of Marketing at Harvard University, Prof. James Culliton . In 1948, Culliton published an article entitled, The Management of Marketing Costs in which Culliton describes marketers as' mixers of ingredients' . Some years later, Culliton's colleague, Professor Neil Borden, published a retrospective article detailing the early history of the marketing mix in which he claims that he was inspired by Culliton's idea of' mixers', and credits himself with popularising the concept of the' marketing mix' . According to Borden's account, he used the term,' marketing mix' consistently from the late 1940s . For instance, he is known to have used the term' marketing mix' in his presidential address given to the American Marketing Association in 1953 . </P> <P> Although the idea of marketers as' mixers of ingredients' caught on, marketers could not reach any real consensus about what elements should be included in the mix until the 1960s . The 4 Ps, in its modern form, was first proposed in 1960 by E. Jerome McCarthy; who presented them within a managerial approach that covered analysis, consumer behavior, market research, market segmentation, and planning . Phillip Kotler, popularised this approach and helped spread the 4 Ps model . McCarthy's 4 Ps have been widely adopted by both marketing academics and practitioners . </P> <P> The prospect of extending the marketing mix first took hold at the inaugural AMA Conference dedicated to Services Marketing in the early 1980s, and built on earlier theoretical works pointing to many important limitations of the 4 Ps model . Taken collectively, the papers presented at that conference indicate that service marketers were thinking about a revision to the general marketing mix based on an understanding that services were fundamentally different to products, and therefore required different tools and strategies . In 1981, Booms and Bitner proposed a model of 7 Ps, comprising the original 4 Ps extended by process, people and physical evidence, as being more applicable for services marketing . </P>

Who coined the four p’s of marketing