Philip Kotler

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Sep 12th 2008
From Economist.com

Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University’s business school, located a few miles north of Chicago on the shores of Lake Michigan, frequently ranks among America’s top ten business schools. But in one discipline it stands head and shoulders above the rest. Its marketing department is regarded by industry as second to none. Philip Kotler (born 1931), who has been a professor of marketing at the school for over 40 years, is largely responsible for that.

His book “Marketing Management”, first published in 1967, is a classic textbook which has already run to more than a dozen editions. It applied rigorous analysis and mathematical methodology to the practice of marketing, something that had never been done before. Its influence over the past four decades has been monumental—even as the book itself has become ever more monumental (the 12th edition has over 800 pages). Gary Hamel said of it: “There are few MBA graduates alive who have not ploughed through Kotler’s encyclopaedic textbook and have not benefited enormously from doing so...I can think of few other books...whose insights would be of more practical benefit to the average company.”

Together with Theodore (Ted) Levitt, Kotler was responsible for lifting marketing out of the disrepute in which it had once been held, changing it from being the slicker part of sales to being a recognised strategic function in its own right. Eventually Kotler came to see marketing as being about the exchange of values between two parties and, as such, a social activity, not just a business one. He coined the term “social marketing”, defined by Wikipedia as “the systematic application of marketing (along with other concepts and techniques) to achieve specific behavioural goals for a social good”.

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Kotler has always seen marketing as something that evolves over time, and his book has also moved with the times. It was at first focused on transactional marketing, but it now pays much more attention to relationship marketing, the idea of customer loyalty as the means to build a whole series of sales out of a single transaction.

Kotler has also stretched marketing outside the business arena, writing articles, for instance, about how to apply marketing to health-care organisations, to individuals (celebrities) and even to countries.

By training Kotler was an economist, studying first at the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, a free-market evangelist, before moving on to do a PhD at MIT under Paul Samuelson, a Nobel Prize-winning Keynesian economist. The two economists’ opposing philosophies so frustrated him that he switched for a while to mathematics, and at that time had his first introduction to people who were teaching marketing.