The concept of the marketing mix has been a mainstay in the past marketing courses that I’ve taken at UBC. The mix typically includes: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place (or distribution) decision variables. As Brad Geddes explains in, “Putting Search into the Marketing Mix” the proliferation of the internet has created the need for an additional variable to be added to the marketing mix, online search. With about 10 billion dollars spent per year, online search is a small mix variable in comparison to the 150 billion dollars spent per year on the four traditional offline mix variables, but it will only continue to grow. In his article, Geddes goes on to explain that in comparison to the traditional advertising channels which push themselves into the consumers consciousness, online search advertising actually pulls the consumer to the product or brand.
With more users logged onto the internet than ever before and more of those users taking advantage of online search than ever before, it seems that more attention should be paid to this relatively young and untapped mix variable. It seems that the technique of pulling customers to a business through their own interest will be much more effective than pushing it upon them.