Philosophy, psychology, psience and the pfuture Kotler on Marketing, by Philip Kotler
Future prosperity, we are told, revolves around generating demand and not around cutting costs. For this reason, marketing is perhaps the primary challenge of any good management team.
The marketing executive is routinely expected to target a market, position a product, match features to benefits, select channels, and establish the pricing policy. In addition he or she allocates and primes the sales force, manages the brand, and manages category profitability. Indeed, it has been said, that the best training for a future marketing director is a short spell as CEO.
Professor Kotler is often regarded the world's foremost marketing authority. He has been writing textbooks over four decades and his eight hundred and fifty-page book, Marketing Management, is widely referred to as the bible. In Kotler on Marketing, he takes the reader through a whirlwind tour of the marketing discipline. Marketing is more than "selling with a college degree". Rather it supplements selling, using strategic tools, such as segmentation, and tactical tools, which help match benefits to needs. As Dilbert says, the most important segment is the 'stupid rich', and if you sell enough units there, then you develop economies of scale and can sell to the 'stupid poor', the segment "where the real volume is".
The book has four chapters on strategic marketing which teach us how to build value and deliver brand equity. It then has four chapters on tactical marketing which teach us to design the marketing mix, and two chapters on administrative marketing, which involves planning, organising, evaluating and controlling. It has a further section on transformational marketing, looking at trends and predicting the essential marketing issues of the future.
Management textbooks are well known for their acronyms and alliterative lists, the three R's, the four P's, and the seven S's to name a few. This book is contains many such lists from winning marketing practices, to an updated version of the four P model, as well as the five generic value propositions. Each chapter has questions at the end to help the manager "apply the content to his company's situation", and there is an appendix at the end looking at success strategies of marketing in different industries.
Jane Gephart, editor of the Sloan Management review, asks her contributors if they can write an introduction which "does not mention the pace of change in today's world". Kotler on Marketing mentions the pace of change repeatedly and uses the standard case studies such as Wal-Mart and South West Airlines in their expected settings. However, if you are not one of the three million students who have bought Professor Kotler's text books, and don't have the time to wade through 800 pages, then you will find this book easy to read and comprehensive. It will give you the framework, the questions, and the language needed to hold an intelligent marketing conversation. In that sense, this book is itself a case study in marketing; it is a repackaged product, aimed at a target market and using value pricing.
Book Review: Kotler on Marketing, How to Create, Win and Dominate Markets, by Philip Kotler, the free press 1999.
Dr Michael Gering, Michael is a director at Sediba consulting, a company which he co-founded.
