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INTRODUCTION
In recent years the Department of Retailing and Marketing at the Manchester Metropolitan University has successfully developed and delivered a range of traditional and short courses; based on both the distance learning principle and the traditional university attendance-based system. All these courses have the teaching of the principles of marketing as a foundation stone. The majority of newly developed courses are tailored to meet the needs of practitioners in business, retailing and commerce. Examples of company courses are the BA (Hons) Retail Marketing (Open Learning) developed for J. Sainsbury plc, the Postgraduate Diploma in Retail Management, run in co-operation with Allied Lyons Retailing/Carlsberg Tetley and MFI, the B&Q Certificate in Management and the MA in Retail Management. At the same time a range of short courses were delivered to companies as diverse as Crown Berger UK, Wilkinsons, Ansells and B&Q.
It is this close co-operation with practitioners from a broad range of companies which alerted the author of this article to the apparent lack of practical application of the basic marketing tools by the management of these leading companies. Even though there seems to be a basic understanding of the marketing mix and company objectives, practitioners appear to find it difficult to translate the academic frameworks into practical tactics which would help them achieve their objectives.
This article re-investigates the marketing literature, and reviews present methods of the application of marketing concepts to clarify where the stumbling blocks for practitioners lie. The conclusions from this review are used to propose a new framework for the congruent mapping of marketing mix elements and variables at both the strategic and tactical level. The application of the framework to two company cases by leading managers in loosely structured group interviews tentatively explores the face and respondent validity of the framework, and points the way to a more concise operationalization of the variables and elements for future study.
THE MARKETING MIX -- A HISTORICAL REVIEW
In the Macmillan Dictionary of Retailing, Baron, et al.[1] define the retail marketing mix as "those activities that show similarities to the overall process of marketing, requiring the combination of individual elements". This definition closely resembles traditional definitions of the marketing mix given by well known marketeers from Levitt[2] to Kotler[3]. Also in...