Few people have dominated a single business discipline as surely as Philip Kotler has dominated marketing. His book, Marketing Management, is the definitive marketing textbook and has been read by students for the last 40 years. His most recent book is Chaotics (with John Caslione) which provides a new take on the economic downturn. Philip Kotler talked with Stuart Crainer in London
Q: With success comes responsibility. Do you ever feel daunted by the sheer reach of Marketing Management which is now in its thirteenth edition?
I've been gratified that it's adopted in all countries by graduate schools of management. The concern is that if my formulation of the discipline of marketing is wrong, I've set back the world.
So far, many attempts have been made to build another version of marketing and they all have failed. Apparently, I am able to sense the next set of ideas and I put them in just before someone else hits those ideas.
Q: It's easy to forget that marketing was a fledgling discipline at that time.
It really started in the 1910s, the word marketing, because we always had the word market. It went through some interesting stages, in fact, we could read some of the old marketing books and remember things we've forgotten.
For example, there is a very good book by Beckwith back in the forties about credit and how credit should be disciplined because if you are too generous in lending money to people who won't pay it back, you could have a bust. One would find some treasures in some of the old books where they spotted things that we've forgotten about.
Q: Which other marketing thinkers do you admire because when we do our Thinkers 50 ranking, you are always the top marketing guy.
I still have to put Peter Drucker at the head because although we think of him as the father of management, I think of him as the grandfather of marketing.
He said that the purpose of a company is to create customers and then he went on to say that the two most important functions of a business are innovation and marketing, all the rest are costs. That influenced a lot of my thinking.
Then within marketing there has been Ted Levitt at Harvard with his marketing myopia, his globalization article and a number of other things. There have been some very good original thinkers both outside of the field of marketing who gave us some sense of things, like Marshall McLuhan about media, but inside the field there are a lot of great people.
Q: Do you think marketing is heading in the right direction with people understanding it more and it being practiced more professionally?
It is a good question because marketing to so many people means advertising or it means hard selling. The imagery is very bad. But when it is practiced beautifully…
You have an example of it in Tesco and the way with its club cards it can learn so much more about what different groups of people in its community want and how Tesco could address those different groups. Marks & Spencer picked itself up from a bad situation through good marketing thinking and Richard Branson is always full of new ideas -- the talent pool is incredible.
I have to rewrite my marketing management book every three years because so much new has happened. I told a CEO who wanted me to sign his book that I couldn't do it because he is still working on the first edition of "Marketing Management" and it's well thumbed.
I said, do you like the chapter on the Internet? He says, you're joking. I said, did you use the concepts of brand equity, customer equity and customer lifetimes? He said, that's not in the book, are you trying to sell me a new book? I said, yes, for your sake.
Marketing changes, it's not geometry; geometry hasn't changed for 2,000 years. That's why I keep getting this excited and why I enjoy it.
(Source: www.management-issues.com)