A History of Marketing

Welcome to the first episode of A History of Marketing. This podcast is a quest to understand how marketing evolved and today, we kick off this quest with an absolute legend: Dr. Philip Kotler, also known as the 'father of modern marketing.'When I originally had the idea for this podcast, Phil was the very first person I reached out to, and meeting him has already made this project worthwhile.Phil Kotler has authored over 90 books, including Marketing Management, which was my textbook when I studied marketing in school. To prep for this interview I watched his lectures on YouTube and read his autobiography, My Adventures in Marketing which is a lot of fun.Phil Kotler’s career has spanned over six decades and his work has fundamentally shaped how we understand and practice marketing, so we cover a lot of territory in our 30 minutes together. Now here it is, my conversation with Dr. Philip Kotler.Read the full transcript: Note: This text is from a recorded conversation transcribed with AI. I have read it to check for mistakes, but it is possible that there are errors that I missed. I’ve also added images and helpful links in the transcript.Andrew Mitrak: Dr. Kotler, thanks for joining us!Philip Kotler: Oh, thank you for inviting me. I'm always excited to talk about the history of marketing and where it's going.The Emergence of the Word "Marketing"Andrew Mitrak: I want to start at the beginning of where the word "marketing" originated. In one of your lectures, you give a fascinating illustration. You mentioned that if you looked in a Webster's dictionary, you wouldn't find the word "marketing," but then if you picked up a dictionary in 1910, you would find the word "marketing" in it. So I'm just curious what happened around the turn of the century with the emergence of "marketing?"Philip Kotler: I would guess it wasn't used so much, maybe in conversation but not in print. Some people might say, "Hey, you're going to sell it or market it," I don't know, but there was no textbook on marketing. The first ones came around 1910. Why were they written? Well, because economists really wrote these new books called "marketing." They felt that economists didn't discuss enough of the factors that influence the level of demand. The main factor economists would talk about influencing demand was price: raise the price, less demand; lower the price, more demand. Well, these guys started to say, "But what about the whole advertising world? Doesn't that affect purchase rates? What about salespeople who knock on doors and show you new things and get your purchase order?" And then distribution, the whole system is quite complicated. So we needed a book, said economists, most of them were economists, that described things that economic theory didn't discuss or had no theory about, or fuzzy theories about. What is advertising and sales, and is that of any importance to mention when you're talking about macroeconomics or microeconomics? So that's how the book came about.Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. So these economists, these are sort of pre-Keynesian era economists, pre-Austrian School, very early economics. And marketing sort of originated as an academic pursuit from economists. I'm curious about when professional marketers, when you see a marketing job title in a company, would that also occur at the same time or was that later?Philip Kotler: Well, that was later too. Actually, marketing was not looked upon as an important function. They called it really "advertising." And there was a separate group that was running the sales force. The two big things were, somehow we've got to incorporate in our thinking at that time something to say about a whole industry called "advertising" and a whole industry called the "sales force." The early books described these two areas in familiar terms, in common sense terms, but without much research. In other words, you'd find in one of the early books on marketing, "Here are the five traits of a successful salesperson." Well, you couldn't argue against those, but there was no evidence, no empiricism applied to figuring out why did IBM have a superior sales force and someone else did, and so on. And the same with advertising, it was common sense ideas of what make ads work well, print ads of course, this was maybe before we got to radio ads and television ads.Philip Kotler's Journey: From Economics to MarketingAndrew Mitrak: We talk about marketing as a form of applied economics and marketing originating from economics, and you yourself got your Masters and your PhD both in economics. I'm wondering if you could talk about how you jumped from economics to marketing and, I guess more broadly, what that relationship between economics and marketing is.Philip Kotler: Those are two good questions. My economics degree at the Master's level was from the University of Chicago. I was a student of Milton Friedman.Andrew Mitrak: Wow.Philip Kotler: Therefore, I was learning Friedman economics in the sense, which is free market, and not only free market economics, but where the government is the problem, not the economy. But then, nothing about marketing. Then I moved for my PhD to MIT, and Professor Samuelson, Paul Samuelson, is the leader and he's a Keynesian economist. He believes that the government plays an important role, especially in recessions and depressions, of learning how to pump in more money so consumers will have more to spend and businesses could pick up on that demand. Now, that meant, how will consumers use the money that they're going to get? I got interested in the marketing question of how consumers use their money and how companies try to get consumers to use the money to buy the things that the companies are making. So marketing strategy became very interesting to me. And when I was hired at Northwestern University, the dean there said, "Do you want to teach economics or do you want to teach marketing?" But he made a statement, he says, "You know, economics is a pretty settled field. It's hard to become Paul Samuelson or Milton Freedman again. Marketing is ready for development." He was right. I was tempted to and see, more curious about the everyday world of people buying goods and services and companies trying to sell those goods and services.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that's actually probably some broader career advice of looking at what's the emerging category and the frontier versus what's been more saturated and played out. I'm curious, beyond academia, your first encounters with marketing just as a young person. Were there advertisements that you encountered that you felt were specifically memorable or campaigns, or just as a consumer, what were your interactions or observations about marketing at the time?Philip Kotler: I was very interested in advertising campaigns and whether they were a good use of the money of the company to get more demand coming about. For example, I would watch the Coca-Cola campaign, and I would say to myself, "Something's strange because there's no information that's new in the campaign." Everyone knows what Coke is, many people love it. So what's its purpose? Why tell us nothing? Well, they, that's not really what happened. It was showing the consumers in a happy state. It was an emotional response that was being, not a cognitive response. But the aim of the campaign was going to be to get people to feel happier connected with drinking Coke. But I wasn't just interested in advertising. I became interested in the whole idea of how to manage the marketing function in the company. Because frankly, the marketing function did not, was not in on the inner circle of the company. There's always the head of finance, we call the Chief Financial Officer, and their chief and product managers and all that. Marketing was there to help after all the other decisions were made. I'll give you an illustration. Often, the company has developed an innovation without any marketing people being part of the development of the innovation. And then when it was ready and tested in some ways, they call on the marketing people, "It's your turn to advertise it." Marketing people say, "Well, why did you price it that high? What was, who's the target market exactly? And why didn't you add these features? How did you even know that this was the best offer you could make?" So I was impressed with the companies that failed to include market-oriented thinking and customer-oriented thinking in making new products.Figures who Influenced Marketing: Peter Drucker, Dale Carnegie, Ralph Nader, Abraham MaslowAndrew Mitrak: Who are some of the leaders that most influenced you or who are the most influential people in the field of marketing that preceded your expertise in marketing?Philip Kotler: Peter Drucker was not only the father of management, but he had a great appreciation of marketing in his voluminous writings. He was the one who said, "The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary." Because if you knew a lot about a customer, you will know that whether that person is going to even care about what you make. And if you know he will or she will care about it a lot, you have a right away to make it available and expose to them that they would get excited and they'd stand in line to buy it. In other words, his idea was to come out with a product that makes people just join the line to buy it as soon as possible. And we've seen products like that. Peter Drucker, here were some of his statements, and he's writing about management, but he loved marketing too. One of his statements, "The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation." Marketing and innovation produce results, all the rest are costs. Now, that was a put out to the people in production, people in finance, and so on. But if so, a company that is not good at marketing and innovation will slow down and die eventually. He says, "The purpose of a company is to create customers, not to make products." You know, in the old days, we say, "That's a car company, they make cars," right? No, they make customers for cars.Andrew Mitrak: Okay, just want to pause on that. That's such a flip where I feel like sometimes today, marketing is seen as a cost center or the a cost of doing business and this is so contrary to that. And this is coming from somebody who is really an expert in business management stating this. So it is, it is just surprising to hear that it's so contrarian to sometimes what's the perception of marketing today.Philip Kotler: Yeah.Andrew Mitrak: In one of your talks as well, I saw you describing characters who influenced marketing and you mentioned Dale Carnegie, of course, from How to Win Friends and Influence People, the famous book.Philip Kotler: Of course, the idea of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People was a testament about the kind of behavior someone who's selling something should have toward the buyer. It wasn't a book about applying high pressure or hard selling. It was soft selling, soft, engaging. It was valuing the consumer and the purpose, and probing what actually is operating in his or her mind. So that was good work. There were other people. You know, we had attacks on marketing too. We had people who said, "Our cars are unsafe." General Motors is making unsafe cars.Andrew Mitrak: Ralph Nader.Philip Kotler: Then we had Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard, saying that even when you're in a theater, you may have to get up and get the popcorn because the movies have behind them a little thing that is suggesting that you're having a hunger for some popcorn. Never proven, of course, but the Hidden Persuaders, right? So, you know, I always said marketers deserve criticism and need to figure out how to respond.Andrew Mitrak: What did the curriculum for marketing look like as you were becoming a student and a, and then a professor of marketing?Philip Kotler: We found out that as a faculty member of a very good marketing group at Northwestern University, we divided our skill set into those marketing teachers who were going to be very quantitative, use methods of cluster analysis, regression analysis, sophisticated things, and those who were behaviorally oriented. They were going to get deeply into motivations of consumers and benefit formulations.Brand building became very much, some people thought that the point was reached where maybe the field should be called "branding" rather than "marketing." But I argued against that because while branding is the most important, one of the most important things about marketing, the work, marketing is more about what products should we be making, and who do we want to go after. The brand comes up as part answers, but it's not a full enough question. Marketing is a holistic area. Now, I had a lot of influence from a fellow named John Howard, who didn't have much public presence, but he wrote wonderful stuff. He really took, helped create a framework for thinking about marketing.But of course, the main framework that came about was what Jerome McCarthy did, the 4 P's thing. A little story about that. McCarthy went to Northwestern University for his training and took the class of Dick Clewett, who was a very good marketer and Clewett always talked about the three P's and the 1 D. He said, "Marketing is about product, price, and place, and distribution."What is, what was Jerome's, what was Jerome's contribution? Instead of using the word "distribution," he used the word "promotion" instead. And so, product, price, place, and promotion, those were the four P's. Now, that's called the "marketing mix." Do you realize that historically there was a man named Neil Borden at Harvard who, in the maybe '40s, had a marketing mix of 12 tools that marketers can use? Interest, the interest rate is a tool. If you lower interest, more people will buy homes and all that. Great. Well, things, and so the interesting thing is that we went to four P's. Clewett was the inspiration that gave it to our friend who did it. But the interesting thing is strategy, well absolutely. Actually, those tools are tactics. Strategy is above that. Marketing mix elements are the tactics of marketing, but they have to be informed by a strategy that has figured out a need that isn't being met.Andrew Mitrak: I want to talk about Marketing Management, which is the most widely used textbook today for marketers. And in your autobiography, you mentioned that as you were writing this, you weren't happy with any of the existing marketing textbooks. And this was partially what inspired you to write the first edition of Marketing Management. I suppose what was missing from these marketing textbooks at the time, and what did you want to do differently?Philip Kotler: I wanted to have more theory about how can consumers actually behave. What we had, simple theories of people having needs. In fact, we had that famous one where there's needs going all the way from just to exist, your hunger being satisfied. But what is that triangle called?Andrew Mitrak: Maslow's hierarchy of needs.Philip Kotler: Yeah, so that scheme was there, but the behavior of sciences were growing and getting more sophisticated. We began to know much more about how the consumer side. So, all right, I felt Marketing Management offers a more comprehensive theory of consumer behavior and a more comprehensive theory of company behavior, management behavior, than we had really seen. I did a lot of work about strategy, differentiating between tactical marketing and strategic marketing. I also thought that some of the sophisticated tools for measuring demand and forecasting demand that I learned in the one-year Harvard program have to get explained to the students through the professor's learning roughly more about market segmentation theory. And then I quoted something, I think I developed it myself, STP. That marketing is about segmentation, targeting, and positioning.Andrew Mitrak: I didn't realize that segmentation, targeting, positioning was something that you coined or came up with and popularized in your books. It's something that I come back to over and over. Do you recall the stroke of insight that led you to come up with that?Philip Kotler: Well, it has to do with segmentation, which I was not the inventor of, the idea of doing more segmentation. I'm trying to remember the professor who wrote the most interesting article on it. But once you get into knowing there's even mathematics for segmentation, for optimizing on segmentation, that you now have segments, but you can't sell to all the segments. So targeting, figuring out the ones for whom you have the best product, and then communicating that it's the best for them is called positioning. Now, if that doesn't lead to branding, I don't know what does. So STP is the tool set for getting to build a strong brand.Andrew Mitrak: Just coming back to Marketing Management, which is now in its 16th edition, I'm just curious about how it was first received. What was the initial reception of it like?Philip Kotler: Well, I was delighted with the response, and I figured out the answer to why it was successful. It was successful because the marketing group always felt inferior to the finance group in a company. Marketing was common sense, but finance was science, right? Along comes a book, my 1967 book, that says marketing also has science to it. In other words, my book gave prestige to marketing. It gave a vocabulary and a mental framework where marketers are saying that they can add a lot of value. There was a whole group that thought marketing should stay centered on commercial activities, and I and Sid Levy, my colleague, said, "No, marketing is much broader than that because, first of all, you have the nonprofit organizations, and they're marketing a cause."Social Marketing: Applying Marketing to Social CausesAndrew Mitrak: Yeah, well this kind of leads into social marketing in a way. You mentioned your colleague, Sid Levy, and you published a 1969 article entitled "Broadening the Concept of Marketing," and then in '71, you published an article in which you coined the term "social marketing." What inspired you to look at broadening marketing, and what inspired you to help create social marketing as a field?Philip Kotler: The broadening, I mentioned, is coming about because we found out that all organizations want to use some advertising, and they have a pricing problem, and so on. But as far as social marketing, it came about because of cigarettes. We were all upset about how many people smoke and want to stop smoking. Can marketing help them stop smoking or smoke less? Yes, what we could do is the four P's: make the product taste poor or find a cigarette that is at least less harmful since they still want to smoke, or make it harder to find where you can buy cigarettes. Don't put them right in the front of the retail situation, put it in the closet. And then the guy selling to you has to go into the closet and get your Marlboro package or something. And then raise the price of cigarettes, so it's harder to smoke five a day at that price. And then do a promotion that makes it look ugly to be a smoker, that you're, show how your health, you're coughing all the time now, and so on. So the four P's work beautifully on that. Today, they're not working for companies to sell more product, but they are there to use a set of tools to help people get off of something that they themselves don't want to be on.Pushback Against Broadening the Concept of MarketingAndrew Mitrak: Oh, wow. I want to come back to this idea of broadening the concept of marketing. From what I understand, there was maybe even some pushback of people saying, "Hey, we want marketing to be more of a narrow field focused on products and services," while clearly, marketing is much broader than that. I'm curious what the first reception to this idea was.Philip Kotler: Well, I think people were hostile, but I would say that there was a group that wanted to stay with commercial business only. And we took a vote. We asked the AMA, American Marketing Association, to run a vote on this question of, "Do you, as a professor and member of the AMA, feel we should not stray from commercial marketing or that we should also allow that to happen?"And the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of broadening marketing. That's the best way to settle something is to just take a vote.Marketing may undergo another revolution. I'm waiting for it to happen. I want to be in on it too.Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about your six decades or more into a career in marketing, that you're continuously researching the cutting edge. Any tips or what's your secret to doing this?Philip Kotler: Well, some of it must be genes. Everyone has a set of genes. I was lucky to have good health. I've always been interested in learning everything there is to learn in the world. I've had an Aristotelian appetite because Aristotle, in my mind, knew everything at that time. He wrote on poetics, he wrote on drama, he wrote on science, and so on. But different people come along, and some stay with one passion and do so well, and they move the whole area upward. But I've been interested in broad questions and what's happening in the world as well as what's happening in business at large.The Marketing Lessons of Dale Chihuly and Studio Art GlassAndrew Mitrak: And as far as your interest in a breadth and a wide range of topics, I know one of your interests is collecting contemporary studio art glass. I'm on this call from Seattle, and Dale Chihuly is a local icon. Just a fun question, I'm curious if there are any marketing lessons we could draw from the life and work and brand of Dale Chihuly?Philip Kotler: Dale Chihuly put glass in the minds of everyone by not making more of the same. He was selling whatever he made of the same, but he wasn't going to stay making the same. He wanted to see how far you could push glass into being more than it is. So we go to a garden, and we see glass flowers growing. Or we look at a ceiling, and the ceiling is a piece of glass plane, but behind it are all kinds of beautiful things. This is in Las Vegas. Sometimes you're walking on a floor, and underneath it, there are some beautiful objects. There are many great glassmakers now, but he was the one who started it all.And there's nothing quite like it. It's so vibrant and colorful, and it seems distinctive and highly imitated but never as good.Andrew Mitrak: Dr. Kotler, thanks so much for your time. Are there any things that you'd like to promote or that listeners can look up, anything you'd like to plug?Philip Kotler: Well, Andrew, I thank you. I'm coming out with a few new books because I get excited about other areas. For one, for example, has to do with small and medium-sized firms. Whenever I and others try to teach marketing, we always use Coca-Cola and McDonald's and big companies. So small companies are sitting in the audience and saying, "Yeah, but I'm a small company, can I use that? Do I have the amount of money that a big company, I don't have that amount of money." And we always get off of it by saying, "Oh, everything we said you could use in your business, however, whatever size it is." But the truth is that we don't have any book on marketing for small and medium-sized enterprises, for family businesses. We have some books, but they don't seem to, there isn't a standard yet for that. So one of the books we're coming out with will be on marketing for small and medium-sized businesses. And once we have the title start with family businesses because managing in the small, you see all the issues pop up.Andrew Mitrak: Oh, gosh, and I am looking forward to that one. That's a personal passion area of mine. I look forward to reading that.Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Kotler, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This has just been a wonderful conversation.Philip Kotler: Thank you for starting your interest in the history of marketing because there's so much that we do know, but so much we still don't know. And absolutely, your explorations will be watched, I hope, very much by many, many people. And I want the professors to broadly know about the work you're going to prepare for their use in classrooms too.Andrew Mitrak: Thanks so much.Philip Kotler: So do successful marketing of your work.*****Recent Books Authored By Philip Kotler:Philip Kotler and V. Kumar, Transformative Marketing, Macmillan, 2024.Philip Kotler, Waldermar Pfoertsch, Fabio Guido Ulderico Ancorani, and Ivan Ureta Vanquero, Humanism in Marketing – Responsible Leadership and the Human-to-Human Approach, Springer 2024Philip Kotler, Hooi Den Huan, and Iwan Setiawan, Marketing 6.0. The Future is Immersive, Wiley, 2024.Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya, and Jacky Mussry, Reimagining Operational Excellence: Inspirations from Asia, Wiley 2024.Gabriele Carboni and Philip Kotler, Enlightened Management, Amazon, 2024.Waldemar Pfoertsch and Philip Kotler, B2B Brand Marketing, 2nd edition, 2025. (coming soon) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org