Customer Reviews

Kotler on Marketing: How to Create, Win, and Dominate Markets

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Kotler's latest book is a great refresher course on marketing in the new millennium. The organization and prose of the book make it an enjoyable read, not at all academic and stuffy. We're using it as a textbook in an MBA Marketing Strategy course, and it is comprehensive and insightful as to the new challenges of marketing.

The book is organized into four parts:

Part One: Strategic Marketing - including sections on building profitable businesses through world-class marketing; using marketing to understand, create, communicate and deliver value; identifying market opportunities and developing targeted value offerings; developing value propositions and building brand equity.

Part Two: Tactical Marketing - developing and using market intelligence; designing the marketing mix; acquiring, retaining and growing customers; designing and delivering more customer value.

Part Three: Administrative Marketing - planning and organizing for more effective marketing; evaluating and controlling marketing performance.

Part Four: Transformational Marketing - adapting to the new age of electronic marketing.

Whether you read the book from cover to cover, or add it to your reference library and just read specific sections, you will find it full of useful theories, practical advice and many current examples.

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.

"Companies often fail to recognize that their marketplace changes every few years...Last year's winning strategy may become today's losing strategy. As someone observed, there are two kinds of companies: those who change and those who disappear...Today's economic landscape is being shaped by two powerful forces- 'technology' and 'globalization.' The technological landscape today is dotted with new products...Technology is the ultimate shaper not only of the material substructure of society, but also of human thought patterns...Technology drives the second major force, globalization...Besides technology and globalization, other forces are reshaping the economy. 'Deregulation' is occurring in many economies. Protected companies, often monopolies, suddenly confront new competitors...Another strong force is 'privatization', where former publicly held companies and agencies have been turned over to private ownership and management, in the belief that they would be better managed and more efficient...Yogi Berra, the legendary Yankee catcher, summed it up when he said, 'The future ain't what it used to be.' He might have added: 'Do you feel your company is being chased by wild animals. If not, you should!' Markets are pitiless. Jack Welch would start his management meetings with the admonishment, 'Change or die.' Richard Love of Hewlett-Packard observes: 'The pace of change is so rapid that the ability to change has now become a competitive advantage.' The ability to change requires an ability to learn. Peter Senge and others have popularized the notion of a 'learning organization.' Not surprisingly, companies such as Coca-Cola, General Electric, and Skandia have appointed vice presidents of knowledge, or learning or intellectual capital. Those vice presidents have the task of designing 'knowledge management systems' to enable rapid company learning about trends and developments affecing consumers, competitors, distributors, and suppliers" (pp.3-5).

In this context, in Chapter 1, after saying as the pace of change accelerates, companies can no longer rely on their former business practices to sustain prosperity, Philip Kotler compares busines assumptions and practices that were practiced 'then' with the ones being increasingly practiced 'now' as following:

I- 'Then'

1. Make everything inside the company.

2. Improve on one's own.

3. Go it alone.

4. Operate with functional departments.

5. Focus domestically.

6. Be product-centered.

7. Make a standard product.

8. Focus on the product.

9. Practice mass marketing.

10. Find a sustainable competitive advantage.

11. Develop new products slowly and carefully.

12. Use many suppliers.

13. Manage from the top.

14. Operate in the marketplace.

II- 'Now'

1. Buy more things outside (outsource).

2. Improve by benchmarking others.

3. Network with other firms, collabotate.

4. Manage business processes with multidiscipline teams.

5. Focus globally and locally.

6. Be market-and customer-centered.

7. Make adopted/or customized products.

8. Focus on the value chain.

9. Practice target marketing.

10. Keep inventing new advantages.

11. Speed up the new product development process cycle.

12. Use few suppliers.

13. Manage up and down and across.

14. Operate in the marketspace.

Finally, he writes that those in the 'now' list are viewed as more effective contemporary approaches to profitability. Your company can almost tell how much it has adopted contemporary business practices by placing a check in each list on either the 'then' or the 'now'. If most of the checks are on the 'then', your company is locked in traditional practices.

Strongly recommended.

This book is written for those who is not expert in Marketing and doesn't have time to read through the Marketing Classics "Marketing Management" (one of the thickest Marketing book) by the same author. As it put all Kotler's idea in one book, it also serve as a "review" even for those who read through "Marketing Management". If you are only allow to buy one book from Kotler, buy this! Greate book!

An evocative book. Certainly a welcome departure from the pedantic, "blind-em-with- science" approach of Kotler's other works. This latest "must-read" contribution to marketing strategy has a far better chance of being used by the business world rather than students. The Questions to Consider, featured at the end of each chapter, give a useful introspection to most companies, which should not be complacent with their satus quo. Kotler's refreshing perspective and absorbing interpretation of latest trends are a useful contribution. Hopefully we will see a sequel in the not-too-distant future ...

I use it for my summer hi tech marketing project. I basically follow it entirely on the outline of my marketing plan. Compared to many other marketing books that contain ideas which may or may not work --- obsolete over time. This book contains the true fundamentals of marketing. It is like the Calculus of mathematics. Once you know the basics, you know the rest. In addition, the questions format of the books provide you with leads to brainstorm ideas. I think this book will be my reference for next 20 years!

Kotler's new book lives up to his reputation and the quality of his previous titles. Chapters 8 & 9 are particularly interesting, especially his responses to FAQs in his seminars. Reading the book however feels like sitting through his three-day seminar compressed into one hour. The book might have been better written had it provided more details. Unlike his earlier works, he does not have too many breakthrough ideas nor research support. Still, for any marketing practitioner who wants a refresher course, the book is easy to read.

Managing changing needs and desires! Kotler summarizes this field which is wide and becoming wider. In cogent, succint style, this book takes the marketing executive, student or executive who has to deal with marketers through where the field has been, where it is today and where it is heading.'

This is well done. Examples from real world are included (not much hypothetical, classroom or research stuff included) with great questions to ask yourself at the end of each chapter to probe deeper into the topic. Additional references are provided for those who wish to utitlize the concept further.

I find Kotler very easy to read and follow. The approach here presented is right on! There is a warehouse of great lines that can propel one's marketing, e.g. "If companies focus only on their costs, they will never grow to greatness. Without a top line, there will be no bottom line." or "The way to beat your competitors is to attack yourself first." "Finally, customers don't want promotion; they want two-way communication."

This is a gem of a book to mine for info or to put into practice. Likely those not familiar at all with the field will gain much from reading, while those engaged will find this work extremely practical, productive, clarifying and motivating. Not only does he point out trends and weaknesses and opportunities, but in most cases, provides real practitioners and examples, plus optional opportunities.

Ditto all the praise included before. I'm using the book this summer (2000) as a one week read in my marketing communication management capstone seminar here at FSU. I should add that when I first discovered the book I found it useful as a refresher to hone my own marketing acumen. Despite keeping active in the real world via consulting, it's nice to sit back and reflect on the basics. I recommend it for veterans who need a quick refocus. As my students say, "Kotler is the bomb!"

Kotler's book is great for the non-marketing person. He very well presents the current thinking on marketing topics. Read the book and you can use all the buzzwords correctly with your marketing friends if you're not a marketer. But if you're in the marketing field in any way and don't already know most of the stuff in this book, you're in trouble. You've got some serious catching up to do. Consider Kotler's book as marketing's current aerial tour, but then go buy the books referenced and really learn what you need to know.