Neil Hopper Borden (1895–1980) was an American academic, who served as a professor of advertising at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration.
On advice of his economics professor, he decided to focus on a teaching career in the emerging field of business administration.
He started teaching marketing under Melvin T. Copeland, and succeeded Daniel Starch as the teacher of advertising in 1925.
Borden was selected to write a book on the topic, supported by a grant of $30,000 from the wife of Alfred W. Erickson.
To accomplish this objective, Borden worked with an advisory committee of academic fellows and the Advertising Research Foundation.
Many scholars and practitioners relied on checklists or lengthy classifications of factors that needed to be considered to understand consumer responses.
[10] Borden's continued and consistent use of the phrase, "marketing mix," contributed to the process of popularising the concept.
The "marketing mix" concept gained widespread acceptance with the publication, in 1960, of E. Jerome McCarthy's text, Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach which outlined the ingredients in the mix as the memorable 4 Ps, namely product, price, place and promotion.