The Marketing Guru- Philip Kotler

Contributed by: Chandni Tolaney (2012-2014), WeSchool

The most dreadful thing for the first year students was the 600 odd pages textbook of Philip Kotler.Although the Indian examples mentioned in the South Asian Perspective of the Kotler-Keller-Koshy-Jha were easy to relate to the concepts mentioned in the chapter.Philip Kotler (born 27 May 1931 in Chicago) is an American academic focused on marketing. The author of Marketing Management among dozens of other textbooks and books, he is the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Marketing Students specifically read Marketing Management by Philip Kotler to understand the core nature of Marketing in Corporate terms.Today Kotler is considered to be the best Marketing mind in business world and his experiences in the form of booksare helping a lot of students to understand marketing better and in a more efficient manner. Also a lot of Professionals from Corporates and Professors take the lessons from Kotler’s books.

The most distinguishing fact about Philip Kotler is that he never won any degree in Marketing. He did his master’s from the University of Chicago and then did Ph.D. in economics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He served different positions in Corporate before becoming a Marketing Professor in North Western University. His articles in ‘Financial Times’ and ‘New York daily’ are appreciated throughout the years and received an award in 1985 for distinguished Marketer of the year.

CRUX of Kotler

·   He always writes about Marketing as the primary activity of the Organization. Many Companies who use to concentrate on Manufacturing only, are focusing more on marketing to promote their Manufacturing.

• He gave more Importance to Customers than anything else in its books. Company’s focus needs to be on Customers rather anything on else.
• The most important thing here is that he separates the Marketing from Selling as large number of people use to think Marketing as same as Selling. The confusion was corrected by the examples which he put to clear the differences between both the terms.