Examination of marketing mix performance in relation to sustainable development of the Poland's confectionery industry.

The conventional concept of marketing mix does not take into account the idea of sustainable development. The basic objective of this examination is to analyze and evaluate the performance of selected marketing mix elements from the perspective of the Poland's confectionery industry's sustainable development. The questionnaire survey was designed for this purpose. The purpose of the research questions was to evaluate a degree of development for selected elements of marketing mix from the perspective of sustainable development of the Poland's confectionery industry. Thus, a novel development ratio based on the distance from exemplary performance was proposed. Next, aseminal approach to pairwise comparisons technique was applied for the importance evaluation of each survey question in order to provide a weighted average Mean Development Ratio (MdeR) for each element of marketing mix. In this process the seminal methodology for pairwise comparisons was applied i.e. a non-heuristic approach to pairwise comparisons technique with verifiable accuracy and reliability. In consequence, assuming that all elements of marketing mix have some designated importance in the process of sustainable development, a total weighted average MdeR for performance of all elements of marketing mix was computed and evaluated. Noticeably, the total weighted average MdeR for performance of all elements of marketing mix cannot be considered as satisfactory from the perspective of sustainable development of the Poland's confectionery industry.