Abstract:

Marketing mix is a well known methodology to setup the communication with your customer. Its usage is not only for the business purposes, but everywhere, where you need to build the rules for the promoting of your goods or service, including education or social services as well.

For quite long time (since 1960, McCarthy) the most used template for marketing mix was 4P - Product, Place, Price and Promotion. This concept was enriched for more P's - People, Place of evidence or Process.

In 1990 the new concept was presented by Rogert F. Lauterborn - called 4C and its main difference was its customer orientation - Customer, Costs, Convenience and Communication.

We need to ask if something happened from that time - is there any reason to change or revise this concept? The main event happened in 2004 was the creation of a new concept - Service Science, by Jim Spohrer and overworked by Stephen Vargo and Robert Lush. In the middle of this concept is customer - so the Laterborn´s model was fully accepted. But we need to ask - is it enough? Service Science is the concept, working with very strong relation to information technologies - to help service oriented companies (mostly concentrated to providing IT services) to provide their service smarter, faster and more valuable for the customer.

The main question is if we need to revise the 4C concept (both of them) to develop a new, better, that helps the companies to create marketing mix according to service science rules, reflecting also strong relationship to IT.

The answer is yes - the experiences show the IT technologies extended the impact of marketing and also increased the number of tools the company (and customers) can use.

Then we need to extend 4C concept to 7C adding 3 more C:
● Community - building communities on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Linked-in or similar media) is an independent part of many companies marketing. Strategy for those community building became more a more important for the final relationship with customers
● Channels - channels where everyone who is interested can learn the information or get the actual knowledge (like youtube video or google+).
● Co-creators (Collaborators) - to make a business you need to use many services of the third parties (including social networks, mentioned above). Those services influence the final effect of the marketing with the limited power of your company to defend before any unexpected events. Also value co-creation is the main important part of the Service Science concept and it has to be reflected also in template of the marketing mix.

The main aim of the article should be developing of the concept mentioned above with concrete examples of its usage to prove its merits. To use this concept instead old ones would help the companies to concentrate to the customers needs and the ways how to distribute better service. Also there will be presented practical usage of this concept to promote master study program Service Science, Management and Engineering together with the examples of the business companies that are partners of this study program.

Keywords:

Service science, marketing mix, value co-creation.