The `Guru' of marketing is again `back on track.' Prof Phillip Kotler, like Peter Drucker, refuses to retire or get out-dated. In fact, he seems to follow his own prescription: "Don't just be market-driven" he advises "Be market driving" Or "don't live in the present, but in fact create the future". In his latest book `Kotler on marketing' (The Free Press, 1999 $27) Kotler does exactly that. He is market driving. He analyses the impact of the changing environment and forecasts, how marketing will change to meet new challenges.Phillip Kotler authored `Marketing management' nearly 30 years ago. This book has become the `standard' for students of business management and for marketing professionals through these three decades. It has sold nearly four million copies in over 58 countries, one of the sales records for management books.
Kotler was the first to put forward a `management and decision-making model' in marketing when earlier; all presentations were descriptive and qualitative. A background ineconomics and mathematics helped him to bring a new direction to marketing through, Kotler also extended the application of marketing theory beyond `for - profit organisations', to government and non-profit institutions, to marketing people, places and nations.
`Kotler on Marketing' is in some ways, an abbreviation of the standard tome `Marketing management' and yet, it is much more than just that. The book contains an expansion of Kotler's theory of the five fallacies in marketing. The book is conveniently divided into four parts: Strategic marketing; Practical marketing; Administrative marketing and Transformational marketing.It is full of current examples of companies that have succeeded and failed.
It deals with issues of whether it is always desirable to acquire new customers (one of the fallacies) and to exploring the calculation of cost of acquiring customers and it's relationship to long term profit per customer. It analysis the effect of computers and Internet on marketing and re- examines thecore concept of marketing. Whether it should be a process of exchange or relationships or networks.
At the end of each chapter, Prof Kotler gives a list of questions to consider. For example at the end of the first chapter on `Building profitable business through world class marketing', he adds:
How have technology, globalisation and deregulation affected your business in the last five years. Has your company been basing its marketing strategy largely on one of the nine one-liner strategies? What do you think of the marketing predictions for the year 2005? What are your predictions for your industry? What are you doing to prepare for them?These and other questions which he raises, give a starting point for reflection - and perhaps for discussion by groups within a company. `Kotler on marketing' could well be used as a workbook.
At the end of the book an appendix which gives the characteristics, success strategies and marketing department roles in different types of industrialbusiness eg, in project selling, in heavy equipment selling, industrial commodity selling, telecommunications service, wholesale financial service etc. This adds to the value of the book by enabling a busy executive to have a quite reference check whenever the need arises.
Kotler on marketing is 227 pages of educative reading, presented in a structured and interesting way for absorbing and quick reading and future reference. This book will be a must for all marketing practitioners. On many aspects it will throw new light on what we already know - because in the rough and tumble of life we have little time to do this ourselves!
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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