Philip Kotler

Philip Kotler (born 1931) built the management paradigm that gave marketing its ordering: segmentation, targeting and positioning, the marketing mix, the marketing plan and the marketing audit. His textbook Marketing Management has been the standard text for over half a century, and his greatest contribution is turning marketing from a bag of sales techniques into a coherent management discipline grounded in economics and behavioural science. Criticism of the paradigm, mainly from the empirical school, targets not that ordering but components that proved weaker than the textbook suggests, such as fine-grained segmentation and loyalty strategies. Kotler remains the reference point against which that debate is held.

Key work Marketing Management (1967-2024, 16 edities)

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