Extended Marketing Mix: 7 Ps To Guide Your Marketing Mix

Effective marketing involves harnessing every phase of the customer journey for its full marketing potential. That means thinking beyond what you sell and where you sell it to optimize how customers experience your brand at every stage.

The extended marketing mix is a framework designed to simplify the process of developing a full-funnel marketing strategy. Here’s an overview of the extended marketing mix, including what it covers, how each pillar works, and the benefits of using the mix to create your next marketing strategy.

What is the extended marketing mix?

The extended marketing mix is a framework outlining the seven elements of a complete marketing plan. It builds on the original four-pillar marketing mix—product, price, place, and promotion—first introduced in the 1960s as a way to simplify marketing strategy development. 

While the original framework remains useful for shaping go-to-market decisions, it focuses on making the sale. The extended marketing mix expands that foundation with three additional elements—people, process, and physical evidence—to account for how businesses deliver value before, during, and after a purchase.

The extended marketing mix solves several key problems with the original. The basic marketing mix largely neglects post-purchase customer experiences. It also doesn’t work for service-based businesses, which rely on people, process, and physical evidence to make up for the fact that customers can’t see or hold their products.

The seven-pillar extended marketing mix works for service- and product-based businesses, pushing both business types to optimize every step of the customer journey to its full marketing potential.

7 pillars of the extended marketing mix

• Product
• Price
• Place
• Promotion
• People
• Process
• Physical evidence

Together, the seven pillars of the extended marketing mix form a more complete view of a marketing strategy, covering how businesses attract customers and deliver value from start to finish. Here’s what falls under each pillar and what marketing teams need to know about each:

Product

Product describes the product or service your company sells. Considerations include product or service positioning, quality, features and options, and product-market fit. All influence how customers understand and evaluate your offering. Service-based businesses formally document scope and deliverables to meet the additional challenge of setting expectations for an intangible offering.

Price

This pillar references the dollar amount for which you sell products or services, which is based on your pricing strategy and the cost of each product or service to your business. Competitive pricing, value-based pricing, economy pricing, penetration pricing, and price skimming are all common pricing strategies. Your pricing strategy will depend on your goals, customer demographics, and target market positioning. It will inform how customers interpret your value and place in the market.

Place

Place addresses your business’s distribution channels. It can refer to a physical location like a brick-and-mortar storefront or an online platform like your ecommerce website, a third-party marketplace, or a specialized service delivery platform like a webinar hosting interface. 

Businesses select distribution channels based on target audience behaviors. If your customers frequent Etsy, for example, you might set up an Etsy shop and integrate it with your online store.

For service-based businesses, place also refers to the location of service delivery, which may or may not be the same as the sales channel. A customer might purchase a laser skin resurfacing treatment online, for example, but receive the treatment at a med spa at a later date. In these cases, the delivery environment itself becomes part of the brand experience.

Promotion

Promotion refers to both the traditional and digital marketing tactics a business uses to raise awareness about its brand. Examples include social media marketing and content marketing campaigns, influencer partnerships, paid advertising, and public relations efforts. Promotional tactics can include event-based strategies (like product launches and sales promotions), rewards programs (like customer loyalty programs and referral programs), and sales tactics (like cold emailing and personal selling).

Promotion also describes the messaging and brand identity elements you’ll use to generate demand. Businesses consult market and target audience intelligence to identify effective strategies, create key marketing messages, and brand identity parameters for promotional materials.

People

People is a pillar applicable to both product- and service-based businesses. This element focuses on customer service representatives, sales team members, and any other representatives your customers might encounter. Positive interactions with these people reinforce your brand identity and marketing promises.

Many companies also include key team members in their marketing efforts, from telling the story of a founder’s childhood love of blueberry pie or promoting the impressive credentials of a chief medical officer, for example. Service businesses use this strategy to emphasize the experience and expertise of service providers and communicate the unique value of their offerings.

Process

For the purposes of a marketing mix, process refers to business processes that directly affect a customer’s experience of purchasing, receiving, or owning your product. For product-based businesses, this includes invoicing, shipping, delivery, and staffing of physical stores and customer support teams. Efficient, formalized internal processes help your team provide a seamless, on-brand experience that supports customer retention and repeat business.

Service-based businesses don’t usually need to worry about shipping, but they invest heavily in optimizing service delivery processes. The booking website for a hair salon or the membership renewal system for a fitness business, for example, both maximize service value and help customers recognize it.

Physical evidence

Physical evidence refers to physical elements other than products that communicate a business’s value. They include product packaging, store décor, ecommerce site design, and employee attire. All these small details shape a customer’s impression of your company. For example, Rachel and Jena founded Piecework Puzzles after identifying a gap in the market for design-forward puzzles with modern, maximalist aesthetics. They designed the packaging to look like luxurious art books that belong on a coffee table—physical evidence that led to organic growth on social media. Piecework Puzzles has “grown only organically on social, and I think it’s just because they are so friendly to the camera,” Rachel says on Shopify Masters. 

Physical evidence is particularly important for service businesses, and many service marketers look for opportunities to create physical or visual representations of value. Consider an experienced up-market wedding planner who can deliver a picture-perfect event with two client meetings and a budget. The planner might elect to share a vision board, a design plan, a vendor showcase, and groom- and bridal-party lookbooks, creating visually stunning physical copies and thoughtful reveals or unboxing experiences for each. This strategy sends customers home with a physical branded touchpoint that showcases the planner’s vision and attention to detail and signals a luxury experience.

When to use the extended marketing mix

An extended marketing mix is a must for service marketers, but it can also help product-based businesses harness the full potential of their customer journeys. It is especially valuable during periods of growth or change, when traditional marketing levers alone are no longer sufficient.

Here are three useful extended marketing mix applications:

Expanding a business’s physical presence

Establishing or growing an on-the-ground presence calls for increased attention to people, process, and physical evidence. An extended marketing mix can help you optimize physical spaces, increasingly complex inventory and fulfillment processes, and the care provided by your growing team. It also helps you standardize key elements between digital and physical sales channels, creating a more consistent brand experience across locations and touchpoints.

Improving customer satisfaction scores

Product, price, place, and promotion can help you make sales, but the four Ps framework omits operational elements that directly influence how customers evaluate a brand after purchase. If you provide a quality physical product but are struggling with low customer satisfaction scores (CSATs), an extended marketing mix can help you address the remaining touchpoints that shape perception and loyalty. 

When you improve interactions with your team, ensuring timely delivery and excellent customer service, you improve customer satisfaction. Optimizing physical evidence helps align marketing promises with the experience customers actually receive throughout their journey.

Scaling your business

You can also use an extended marketing mix when you scale your business or add new product or service offerings. It can help optimize your current strategy to support your new marketing objectives and ensure that new initiatives provide a consistent branded customer experience. As teams grow, channels multiply, and offerings expand, the extended marketing mix helps you manage increased complexity. It can help to break it down into core pillars like delivery, people, and processes—all core components of marketing performance—as you expand your business as a whole.