Jerome McCarthy

McCarthy and his wife, Joanne, had eight children. He died December 3, 2015.

Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach is one of the world's most popular marketing textbooks. It has been updated by McCarthy and coauthor William D. Perrault more than a dozen times. The textbook's 19th edition was published in 2013.

McCarthy was a member of the American Marketing Association and the Economics Society. In 1987, he received the American Marketing Association's Trailblazer Award. He was also named one of the "top five" leaders in marketing thought by marketing educators.

McCarthy had the Ford Foundation Fellowship in 1963 and 1964, when he investigated the role of marketing in global economic development. After Notre Dame, McCarthy moved to Michigan. He was on the faculty in the Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management at Michigan State University (MSU). In 2013, he was Professor Emeritus there. During his career, McCarthy also held a position at the University of Oregon.

The demise of the functional approach has largely been attributed to McCarthy's contribution. According to Hunt and Goolsby, "The publication of McCarthy's Basic Marketing (1960) is widely cited as the 'beginning of the end' for the functional approach." The 1960s represent a transitional period wherein books adopting the managerial approach existed side by side with those using the more traditional functional approach.

In 1960, McCarthy was the first to propose a marketing mix concept that resonated with both practitioners and academics. In his textbook Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach (1960), McCarthy defined the 4Ps conceptual framework for marketing decision-making, which used product, price, place (or distribution), and promotion in the marketing mix. McCarthy organized his text along managerial lines using the four Ps framework. The book's emphasis was on the problems facing the marketing manager, rather than looking at the characteristics of marketing systems and their functions. In addition to chapters devoted to the 4 Ps, the book also included chapters on consumer behaviour, marketing research and market segmentation to round out the tools available to marketers for use in problem-solving.

In the spring of 1959, while a professor of the College of Commerce, he was informed that he received a one-year Ford Foundation Fellowship at Harvard Business School and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Beginning in September, he focused on mathematical applications for business, as part of the Foundation's program to "strengthen business education and research", and specifically to work on mathematical models for marketing.

He was a professor of the College of Commerce at the University of Notre Dame, beginning in 1956, where he taught courses about how statistics and mathematics applied to business problems.

McCarthy received his Bachelor of Science degree in 1950 from Northwestern University. He received his Master of Arts in 1954 and his PhD in 1958 from the University of Minnesota. His doctoral dissertation was An Analysis of the Use of Marketing Research in Product Development.

At the time when McCarthy began his teaching career, the so-called functional school of thought dominated the discipline. The functional school was primarily concerned with asking questions about what are the functions of marketing, what activities does marketing perform, what is the role of marketing within organisations? Much of the theorising within the functional school focussed on the value adding services performed by intermediaries. As the marketing discipline matured, scholars increasingly searched for a more managerial approach that focussed on solving the problems and challenges faced by marketing managers. Throughout the 1950s, a number of different approaches to managerial marketing emerged. However, some theorists clung to the functional approach, to the extent that both the functional approach and the managerial approach co-existed for a decade or so.

Prior to the publication of McCarthy's text, the concept of a marketing mix was being debated, however, there was little consensus among marketers about what elements should comprise the marketing mix. They relied on checklists or lengthy classifications of factors that needed to be considered to understand consumer responses. Neil H. Borden of the Harvard Business School developed a complicated model in the late 1940s, based upon at least twelve different factors. In contrast, McCarthy's concept was a simplifed, memorable set of factors for managerial planning and decision-making.

Edmund Jerome McCarthy (February 20, 1928 – December 3, 2015) was an American marketing professor and author. He proposed the concept of the 4 Ps marketing mix in his 1960 book Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, which has been one of the top textbooks in university marketing courses since its publication. According to the Oxford Dictionary of Marketing, McCarthy was a "pivotal figure in the development of marketing thinking". He was also a founder, advisory board member, and consultant for Planned Innovation Institute, which was established to bolster Michigan industry. In 1987, McCarthy received the American Marketing Association's Trailblazer Award, and was voted one of the "top five" leaders in marketing thought by the field's educators.

McCarthy's 4Ps concept is particularly suited to most consumer products. The model needs modifications for high-end consumer products, in which case relationship management is a factor. Services have some unique marketing issues to be factored into decision-making. Tactics for marketing industrial products should consider elements of long-term contractual agreements. Regardless of the modifications needed in some cases, the 4Ps remain a generally accepted marketing practice to influence buyers and its concepts still are espoused in contemporary textbooks. Further, the 4Ps marketing mix that McCarthy popularized has become a foundational and widely adopted marketing framework into the 21st century. This is partly due to the simplicity of the model, which makes it adaptable for changes in the marketing area, such as internet commerce. Rather than creating a new model, G. Dominic expressed that McCarthy's 4 Ps could be used with some "extension and adjustment" to develop tactics for the current, ever-changing marketing arena like internet commerce.