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

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For more than three decades, Philip Kotler has been the authority on marketing for business grad students around the world. (His seven textbooks on various aspects of the topic are available in 18 languages in 58 countries, for example, while his seminal Marketing Management is considered the most widely used volume among all MBAs.) Even with all these publications, and a consultation/seminar practice aligned with firms such as AT&T, IBM, Michelin, Shell, and Merck, Kotler never committed to paper his popular theories concerning the ways in which executives and their managers should approach their real-life marketing programs. Until, that is, Kotler on Marketing. Comprehensive yet clear, this new compendium finally synthesizes Kotler's vast experiences and proven ideas into a single accessible resource. Three meaty initial sections address a series of strategic, tactical, and administrative concerns, ranging from identifying opportunities and building brand equity to utilizing outside intelligence and evaluating performance. A brief fourth part titled "Transformational Marketing" offers Kotler's perspective on "the revolutionary impact on the marketplace and marketing practice of the new technologies ... and new media" including the Internet, fax machines, sales-automation software, cable TV, videoconferencing, and "personal newspapers." --Howard Rothman

From Publishers Weekly

If you want to learn marketing, you have to come to Kotler. He is both a pioneer of modern marketing and the leading popularizer of the field. His Principles of Marketing is ubiquitous in business schools throughout the world and he has two other textbooks for advanced classes. Now he gives readers a new way to tap his vast knowledge. The book covers the full range of marketing management and, of course, addresses Internet marketing. Readers won't find the mathematical depth or theoretical rigor that make Kotler's textbook an unpleasant surprise to students expecting an easy course. In fact, this book assumes readers will have a good deal of business experience. It's a terrific capsule of Kotler's marketing savvy. The most significant drawback is that Kotler shows only positive models of successful marketing. This is fine for illustrating general principles and techniques, but it doesn't teach the judgment required to tell good applications from foolish ones. The upshot is that uncritical readers may discover that a little learning is a dangerous thing. Despite these qualifications, this is a fine book on marketing for a general audience.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1 edition (April 21, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684850338
• ISBN-13: 978-0684850337
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #275,955 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Maestro of Marketing speaks again, November 15, 2000

By	Jill Clardy "So many books, so little time...." (Redwood City, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

40 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Philosophy, psychology, psience and the pfuture, December 29, 1999

By	Michael Gering (Johannesburg, Gauteng South Africa) - See all my reviews

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.

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Comparison of traditional and contemporary practices., February 20, 2001

By	Turgay BUGDACIGIL (Istanbul, Turkey) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

"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.