“Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.” Philip Kotler
As we come to the end of our ‘7Ps of marketing’ series, we take a look at founder of the 7Ps of marketing Philip Kotler, and provide a concise overview of our seven part series of the 7Ps each examined by a selection of carefully chosen experts and specialists in their field.

Philip Kotler is considered as one of the pioneers of social marketing. He has been hailed as ‘the world’s foremost expert on the strategic practice of marketing’ by the Management Centre Europe and was listed by the Financial Times as one of the top management gurus of all time. Born in Chicago on May 27 1931, Kotler had been trained as an economist at the University of Chicago and MIT, studying under Nobel Prize-winning figures such as Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow.
“Being trained as an economist, most of my early intellectual work consisted in building models of how marketing works,” said Kotler. “Most of my empirical work has been in consulting engagements where I would arrange for marketing research studies to yield evidence for the company's best strategy move.
“Later I worked on developing new concepts for marketing theory and practice, such as de-marketing, social marketing, mega-marketing, synchro-marketing, place marketing and person marketing. Today’s smart marketers don’t sell products; they sell benefit packages. They don’t sell purchase value only; they sell use value,” said Kotler in Kotler on Marketing.
He defines marketing as a ‘human activity directed at satisfying needs and desires through a process of exchange. In 1967, Kotler’s big idea was that companies ought to be driven by customers and markets, rather than by the intuition of marketing executives. He saw the need to introduce more scientific and analytical thinking into the marketing field. As a result, he introduced a variety of mathematical models to help companies allocate marketing resources, and created the 7Ps of marketing model. In his book he outlined the 7Ps of marketing: Packaging (and branding), People, Price, Promotion, Physical Evidence, Product Placement and Process.
“When I came in, it seemed to me that marketing needed more logical processes for making decisions,” recalls Kotler, who joined the Kellogg School faculty in 1962 and is now the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing.
With three million books in print, Kotler is the most prolific author in the marketing textbook field and his text books are still flying off the shelves, particularly his classic work Marketing Management which remains as popular today as it was 40 years ago when it was published. Through the decades, Kotler’s intellectual output has served as a kind of “brand central station” for astute business leaders looking for an edge in marketing. It is also the most widely used book in graduate business schools around the world, and has been translated into more than 25 languages – such is the demand for Kotler’s wisdom that he has written more than fifty books and published more than one hundred articles in leading journals such as the Harvard Business Review, Sloan Management Review, Business Horizons, California Management Review, and the Journal of Marketing. Marketing was being taught as a discipline before the 1960s, but Kotler revolutionised the way it was being communicated. In comparison to the austere black and white publications that were being churned out in the sixties, Kotler’s book was (and remains) vibrant, full of modern ideas reflecting the best marketing practices of the day.
“The network of knowledge and influence Kotler’s textbooks have generated is unparalleled,” writes Peggy Cunningham, a Queen’s University marketing professor who has analysed the impact of Kotler’s work and served as co-author for a Canadian edition of Marketing Management.  “Millions of MBA and undergraduate students have been educated using his materials. I’ve heard managers, consultants and executive teachers alike cite Kotler’s work as underpinning their thinking, practice and success.
 “Kotler’s talent lay in taking highly complex phenomena and breaking it down into discreet step-wise components,” she notes. “Not only did this make the material more approachable by students, it lent itself to being taught in a clear and organised fashion.”
With the practice of marketing evolving dramatically in the last forty years, he has developed and advanced many marketing concepts, including relationship marketing and social, place and person marketing. “The best line of attack is to attack yourself first,” Kotler says of revising his classic work. “Be aware of the new ideas, trends and stories and make them prominent in the next edition.” Indeed what distinguishes him from the rest is that he is constantly on the lookout for new issues and angles that he may not have addressed.
His contribution to marketing and management has been well documented. In a recent article in the Financial Times, Morgan Witzel states Kotler’s contribution has been threefold:
“First, he has done more than any other writer or scholar to promote the importance of marketing, transforming it from a peripheral activity, bolted on to the more ‘important’ work of production. Second, he continued a trend started by Peter Drucker, shifting emphasis away from price and distribution to a greater focus on meeting customers' needs and on the benefits received from a product or service. Third, he has broadened the concept of marketing from mere selling to a more general process of communication and exchange, and has shown how marketing can be extended and applied to charities, political parties and many other non-commercial situations.”
The American Marketing Association described him as ‘the most influential marketer of all time.’ Dr Kotler has consulted to many major US and foreign companies on marketing strategies and planning, marketing organisation and international marketing through his consulting firm the Kotler Marketing Group (KMG), including IBM, Michelin, Bank of America, Merck, General electric, Honeywell and Motorola.
He holds many major awards, including the Distinguished Marketing Educator of the Year Award of the American Marketing Association and Marketer of the Year by the Sales & Marketing Executives International (SMEI). He presents seminars on leading marketing concepts and developments to companies and organisations in the U.S., Europe and Asia.
At 76, Kotler remains the quintessential marketing leader. He is still teaching, consulting for major corporations and speaking to crowds around the world. He credits his continuous interaction with enabling him to stay ahead of the curve on marketing trends.
PART ONE PACKAGING: Don Williams, CEO of pi global, international branding and design consultancy, with over twenty years experience in the field.
It is important to understand that consumers do not engage with products, they engage with brands. A product is ‘a function,’ a brand is ‘an emotion’. Positioning, branding and marketing products successfully, requires the creation of a credible ‘personality’ for the brand. Some brands are so strong they almost become ‘part of the family’ think of Heinz or Cadbury. For an emerging brand to become a globally recognised name, they need to command instant recognition, so the consumer has got to know both the corporate and consumer brand very well over time.
There are many diverse things to take into account when creating a new brand. Which markets will the brand be present in? Who is the target consumer in those markets? If it’s a single product brand will it have the potential to grow into an umbrella brand? Without a clear understanding of these issues, creating a new brand with any chance of survival would be impossible. Without question it is easier to maintain an old brand than a new one. Over 90 per cent of new brand launches fail, even with huge investment in R&D, design, communication and research have been made. Why? Because old brands carry with them emotional equity developed and nurtured over the years.
To make your product memorable, simple is stronger than complex. Great brands have something which consumers can log into their memories – we call this device a brand icon or extractable branding unit. It is a visual trigger, which often encapsulates many of the brands’ visual equities and can transfer them from medium to medium with ease. These devices are crucial for long-term brand strength. For example, McDonald’s wouldn’t have the high street presence it has without the ‘Golden Arches’. The average purchase decision time is around 2.7 seconds and over 70 per cent of purchase decisions are taken at point of purchase, so packaging needs to cut through the clutter of the supermarket shelf.