Philip Kotler
Interview
MBA in één dag®
In dit miniboekje vindt u meer informatie over Philip Kotler. 1 Kijk voor meer tips, foto’s en videomateriaal op www.mbain1dag.nl MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
CV Philip Kotler •
Philip Kotler werd in 1931 geboren in Chicago.
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Hij studeerde economie aan de University of Chicago en promoveerde daarna, als econoom, aan het Massachusetts Institute of Technology, aan de andere kant van de VS.
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Kotler begon daarna een wetenschappelijke carrière met aandacht voor economie, wiskunde en gedragswetenschap.
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Hij schreef het boek Marketing Management in 1967, waarna ‘marketing’ een echt vakgebied werd.
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Hiernaast publiceerde Kotler meer dan 100 wetenschappelijke artikelen. Ook bekleedde hij diverse bestuurlijke functies op het gebied van onderwijs en marketing.
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Kotler is al decennialang hoogleraar marketing aan de fameuze Kellogg School of Management, dat is een onderdeel van de Northwestern University in Chicago.
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Philip Kotler verzorgt jaarlijks nog altijd vele lezingen en seminars.
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Daarnaast is hij partner in het adviesbureau Kotler Marketing Group, met vestigingen in de VS en China.
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Philip is getrouwd met Nancy en samen hebben ze drie dochters.
2 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
Philip Kotler
MBA in ® één dag
3 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
The Philip Kotler interview Few people have dominated a single business discipline as surely as Philip Kotler has dominated marketing. His book, Marketing Management, is the definitive marketing textbook and has been read by students for the last 40 years.
4 MBA in ĂŠĂŠn dag | Philip Kotler
Interview
His most recent book is Chaotics (with John Caslione) which provides a new take on the economic downturn. Philip Kotler talked with Stuart Crainer in London. Q: With success comes responsibility. Do you ever feel daunted by the sheer reach of Marketing Management which is now in its thirteenth edition? I’ve been gratified that it’s adopted in all countries by graduate schools of management. The concern is that if my formulation of the discipline of marketing is wrong, I’ve set back the world. So far, many attempts have been made to build another version of marketing and they all have failed. Apparently, I am able to sense the next set of ideas and I put them in just before someone else hits those ideas. Q: What first ignited your interest in marketing in the first place because it’s been a lifetime’s passion? I am trained as an economist and it was what was missing from economics that led me into marketing. I studied under Milton
Friedman and became a monetarist and a free market thinker at the University of Chicago and then I went to MIT and I studied under two Keynesians who won Nobel prizes -- Bob Samuelson and Robert Solow. But I began asking whether economists are in touch with the marketplace? Are they of any help in decisions like, how many salesmen should I have? What should I spend on advertising and what about media mixes and so on? These subjects are not part of the economist’s mindset. Q: I got into thinking that maybe I should look at the books written on marketing. At that time they were very good and all ran to 800 pages but they were primarily descriptive – what is a salesman and what is a wholesaler? I decided to recast marketing on the basis of what we know about economic theory, organisational theory, consumer psychology and mathematics and those basic disciplines supported a whole new look at the field of marketing. Q: It’s easy to forget that marketing was a fledgling discipline at that time.
5 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
It really started in the 1910s, the word marketing, because we always had the word market. It went through some interesting stages, in fact, we could read some of the old marketing books and remember things we’ve forgotten. For example, there is a very good book by Beckwith back in the forties about credit and how credit should be disciplined because if you are too generous in lending money to people who won’t pay it back, you could have a bust. One would find some treasures in some of the old books where they spotted things that we’ve forgotten about. Q: How do you stay fresh – you have written about marketing from virtually every angle? I read outside of marketing because some of the best ideas are in quantum physics and look at what we are doing with nanotechnology and so on. One of the things that I am proud of is broadening the concept of marketing. Previously it was only about selling goods
6 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
Interview
or services and I said, my God, we have the tools to sell causes, like say no to drugs and don’t smoke, and then we got into marketing personalities, bands, singers who wanted to get high visibility and we could market places that want more tourists, want more industry or factories. Broadening the concept of marketing was one of my pleasures. Q: You are still doing that. Yes. I have a book on museum marketing and strategy, I have a book on educational marketing and a book on performing arts marketing. Q: Which other marketing thinkers do you admire because when we do our Thinkers 50 ranking, you are always the top marketing guy. I still have to put Peter Drucker at the head because although we think of him as the father of management, I think of him as the grandfather of marketing. He said that the purpose of a company is to create customers and then he went on to say that the two most important functions
of a business are innovation and marketing, all the rest are costs. That influenced a lot of my thinking. Then within marketing there has been Ted Levitt at Harvard with his marketing myopia, his globalisation article and a number of other things. There have been some very good original thinkers both outside of the field of marketing who gave us some sense of things, like Marshall McLuhan about media, but inside the field there are a lot of great people. Q: Your most recent book is called ‘Chaotics’. It comes out at a time, obviously, of turbulence and recession, which is often a time when HR budgets and marketing budgets are the first in line to be questioned and then cut. Yes and we have talked about what marketers and businesses should do during hard times when the cycle is in the down phase and usually it’s spelled out, cut your budgets and cut everything by 20 per cent. This, to me, is the biggest mistake because
7 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
every company is winning through some virtue that it has. One company may be best at service; if you cut 20 per cent of everything in a service-minded company that means we get less service from them, and have less of a reason to prefer them. We need very selective cunning but the truth is there are some companies that ought to welcome the recession as a time when there is enough dis-equilibrium to make new opportunities. I love companies that see the opportunity side rather than the danger side of a recession. I think it was Ryanair where they said, finally, a recession, now we can really go after the big guys. Q: It is a difficult message because people aren’t very comfortable with turbulence and uncertainty, naturally. Yes and we distinguish, by the way, between the business cycle phase and turbulence. Turbulence will exist even after the business cycle is over and we want to see turbulence as a set of spikes of varying sizes that are disturbances to a business.
8 MBA in ĂŠĂŠn dag | Philip Kotler
Interview
We believe that we are headed for heightened turbulence. With globalisation and digitalisation, businesses will be hit faster by more disruptions and interruptions and so on than ever before. I keep telling CEOs, be reachable wherever you are. Companies have to know when their strategy has decayed and is not working. There is a concept we have called Strategic Inflection Points. General Motors had one about 15 to 20 years ago. That is to say their strategy was dying and they kept to it and now we know that they failed completely. Q: You also talk about hyper-competition, which I know Richard D’Aveni talked about in the 1980s and 1990s but that does now seem to be reality. That is a major factor in the turbulence we are seeing and experiencing. There are three things, actually. There are business cycles which we can predict. There is secular change where an industry is absolutely changing the rules -- like the way online is taking over our newspapers and other traditional media. Airlines went through that secular change
when we began to get discount airlines. Then there is this third thing: there are more spikes and the question is how companies should prepare for this. We believe that they need things such as an early warning system, scenario planning and flexible budgeting. Until those processes and systems are put in place their ability to cope with changes, sudden and otherwise, will hurt them. Q: Something like scenario planning has been around for a long time. It actually started with the military because they have to imagine scenarios, but we are at a stage now where the uncertainty level is so great that we also have to imagine some of the things that could happen. We distinguish between undetectable turbulence and detectable turbulence. The early warning system takes care of things we should have noticed anyway but we have to imagine what is the worst that could happen? What would make us a house of cards so we would just fall apart? We don’t know the probabilities, but let’s at
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least loosen our minds and think out of the box, what might hurt us? We can do the same with opportunities. What is the best that we could imagine? How would we take advantage of it if it happens? I am talking about thought exercises, I am not talking about you choose one scenario and say that is the one we are going to have and we are going to use the response to that scenario. We don’t know which one of them will work but what we learn in the process of trying to build scenarios has been invaluable. Q: We are in a period of unprecedented turbulence do you feel optimistic? Yes. I think we have bottomed out in some places, in many places, actually. They talk about green sprouts being noticed. I think if I were in Asia I would be more optimistic because what I saw on this last trip was very great resilience in places like Indonesia and China. They are complaining in China that they were expecting a 10 per cent growth rate in GDP and it is 8 per cent. We would love to hit 4 per cent or even 2 per cent.
10 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
Interview
I think Britain and the US have people with unbelievable creativity and skills so I think we will see an up trend. I think it is going to be slow – I am waiting for 2010 to see if there is a real pick up. Q: Do you think marketing is heading in the right direction with people understanding it more and it being practiced more professionally? It is a good question because marketing to so many people means advertising or it means hard selling. The imagery is very bad. But when it is practised beautifully… You have an example of it in Tesco and the way with its club cards it can learn so much more about what different groups of people in its community want and how Tesco could address those different groups. Marks & Spencer picked itself up from a bad situation through good marketing thinking and Richard Branson is always full of new ideas -- the talent pool is incredible.
me to sign his book that I couldn’t do it because he is still working on the first edition of “Marketing Management” and it’s well thumbed. I said, do you like the chapter on the Internet? He says, you’re joking. I said, did you use the concepts of brand equity, customer equity and customer lifetimes? He said, that’s not in the book, are you trying to sell me a new book? I said, yes, for your sake. Marketing changes, it’s not geometry; geometry hasn’t changed for 2,000 years. That’s why I keep getting this excited and why I enjoy it.
Bron: www.management-issues.com
I have to rewrite my marketing management book every three years because so much new has happened. I told a CEO who wanted
11 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
12 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
A Conversation with Philip Kotler
Interview
Meet the MasterMinds:
Few people have made as profound an impact on business and marketing as Philip Kotler. He is a Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management. He’s also the author of more than twenty books, including the classic, Marketing Management (now in its eleventh edition) and Marketing Professional Services.
Dr. Kotler is included in the Thinkers 50 listing of the most important living management thinkers. He’s also a principal of the global consulting firm, Kotler Marketing Group. In this interview, he brings a simple but potent message to readers: master the basics and you’ll win.
have established strong brands. But most consultants are less distinguished.
MCNews: Do you think consultants and other professional service providers need to improve their marketing strategies and tactics? Kotler: Consultants need to improve their brand-building ability. Of course, consultants such as McKinsey, Booz Allen, and others
By analogy, the head of an architecture firm once told me that his firm could work on any building. I asked, “Suppose I want to build a prison. Could you do a good job?” “Yes,” he said. “But what if another firm has built many prisons that are well-regarded. What can you do to convince me that you
The key to branding, especially for smaller firms, is to focus on a limited number of issue areas and develop superb expertise in those areas.
13 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
are more skilled at building prisons.� He had no answer. MCNews: There has been a great deal of talk about value-based pricing and billing, that is, consultants basing their fees on value to be delivered to clients. Is this approach viable? Kotler: One major challenge is that some consultants are seen as pricing excessively for the services rendered. Consultants must do a better job of documenting their work time but also that they did the work in the most efficient manner. I know of a law firm that is willing to propose the cost of the work in advance and if they are off the mark, they will absorb the difference. Clients want to know what the cost is likely to be. I think that value-based pricing represents an opportunity for differentiation that a smart firm can use to attract new clients against
straight fee-based consultants. Bain and Company would sometimes tell a client that a proposed project would save the client a specific amount. If it failed to do that, Bain would make up the difference. They attracted a lot of clients that way. MCNews: Client loyalty has become the Holy Grail for most consultants. Are there two or three tips you could give consultants to help them improve client loyalty? Kotler: Clients like to believe that their consultants, especially those on retainers, are thinking about their businesses. Smart consultants will send occasional articles that they come across that might interest a client. They may go further and send articles that would have more of a personal, nonbusiness interest for the client.
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One consultant who works with a major candy company is in an enviable position. The candy company found his ideas to be so useful that they said to him: anytime you want to think about some issue in our business and you think we might be interested in your views, just write them down and send us a bill for your time. MCNews: Do you think the consultant-client relationship is changing, and if so, what’s the nature of the change? Kotler: Clients are under increasing cost pressure to cut expenses. They are examining their health, legal and consulting bills more critically. They want value for their money. This should not be a threat to a consulting firm. A consulting firm cannot last that wants revenue without generating proportionate value. The consulting firm’s challenge is to constantly figure out how to generate
Interview
The consulting firm’s challenge is to constantly figure out how to generate more client value per dollar of cost, and to demonstrate this.
more client value per dollar of cost, and to demonstrate this. Whenever possible, the consulting firm should estimate the ROI value they hope the project will create for the client. MCNews: What one piece of advice would you give to a consultant who is just putting together a marketing strategy for a firm? Kotler: A consulting firm needs to choose defined areas of expertise and become the best in those areas. The firm should communicate its expertise through written articles, speeches, and exceptional performance. The firm should prepare effective brochures, ads, and other media. They should build a network of referral sources with accountants, lawyers, and other professionals. MCNews: How can consulting firms learn more about effective marketing? 15
MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
Kotler: They can attend short courses on marketing offered by many business schools. They can contact a professor of marketing to use as an occasional consultant. They can arrange for class projects under the professor. They can solicit marketing ideas from their advertising agency. Ultimately they might spot an excellent professional marketer and put him or her on a retainer. In addition to my previous books, I would also recommend that they read my new chapter on marketing in a forthcoming book called The Contemporary Consultant, edited by Larry Greiner. MCNews: What are the most important skills/ aptitudes required for today’s consultants? Kotler: The most important skill is client relationship management. Some people have a natural aptitude for gaining trust and respect from their clients. They are caring and sensitive people, good listeners and
learners, and good problem solvers. The firm that hires more of these people will succeed regardless of other things. Build a good database on each client’s activities, interests, opinions, and other pertinent information. This will enable you to customize your services and communications to each client. Your firm’s marketers must also develop brand-building skills that go far beyond brochures and advertising. Brand building also occurs through event management, sponsorships, contributions to good causes and other activities. MCNews: How can consultants attract more clients? Kotler: Consultants need to identify the specific clients they want to acquire. Many years ago I told a law firm that it needed to
16 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
Interview
The most important skill is client relationship management.
distinguish between soliciting business and positioning itself for business. The latter is much better and consists of building a reputation for doing something so well that word of mouth acts as the soliciting force, not sales calls. Consultants can generate buzz through giving speeches, writing articles, and joining organizations and soon word of mouth will convey their true reputation. MCNews: Thanks for your time.
Bron: www.managementconsultingnews.com
17 MBA in ĂŠĂŠn dag | Philip Kotler
Interview with Philip Kotler “Companies need to increase their ratio of lateral thinking to old-fashioned vertical thinking.” - Philip Kotler.
18 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
Interview
Philip Kotler is the SC Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Chicago. Kotler is hailed by Management Center Europe as “the world’s foremost expert on the strategic practice of marketing.” Kotler has authored what is widely recognized as the most authoritative textbook on marketing: Marketing Management, now in its 12th edition. Kotler has also authored, or coauthored, a number of other leading books, including Kotler on Marketing, Lateral Marketing Strategic Marketing for Non-Profits, Marketing for Healthcare Organizations, Marketing Professional Services, Marketing From A to Z, Ten Deadly Marketing Sins, Marketing Moves, Marketing places, The Marketing of Nations, and Social Marketing. Kotler has recieved 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 and Marketing Executives International (SMEI). Kotler has consulted many major US and foreign companies-
including IBM, Michelin, Bank of America, Merck, General Electric, Honeywell, and Motorola, in the areas of marketing strategy and planning, marketing organization, and international marketing. More >> What exactly do you mean by Innovation? Innovation means “the process of bringing out something new all the way to commercialization.” Innovation is a larger concept than invention. Invention occurs when a person imagines something new and brings it into existence. But this does not mean it will be successful. Innovation involves a managed process, consisting of creating a new idea, testing it, creating a prototype, doing a business analysis, doing a market test, and diffusing it commercially. The skill set needed for innovation is much greater than that needed for invention. Creativity and Innovation seem to be very much interrelated. Your take on that. You need to encourage creative thinking in an organization to find new ideas. Creativity 19
MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
can be encouraged by hiring some creative people, hiring an agency to create new ideas, or training your own people to use creativity techniques. But, just generating new ideas is not enough. They have to be evaluated and the better ones pushed forward in an innovation process. What is the role of innovation in a firm’s survival in this competitive business world? Until now, we tend to mention only a few companies highly regarded as innovative, such as Sony, 3M, Virgin, and Apple. But every company needs to be innovative. Nothing lasts. Competitors are always attacking your weaknesses or coming out with new strengths. All companies need to set aside a budget and a process for improving their offerings and inventing new offerings. Is adding value or features to a product a form of innovation? There are different degrees of innovation. If a camera manufacturer increases the camera’s speed, this is a product improvement and, at the best, a small level of innovation. If a 20 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
Interview
camera manufacturer adds a feature where a still camera can also make a video, this is a higher level of innovation. Much depends on the value added and the feature. Is innovation a one-time affair or an ongoing, never ending process? Innovation should be part of the company’s culture and not a onetime affair. The company should continually encourage new ideas from its employees and partners. Any particular firm you would like to mention here in this context? Toyota constantly improves its automobiles and its manufacturing system. It is said that they get about seven improvement ideas a year per employee and put about half of these ideas into practice. Their success as an auto company emphasizes the importance of cultivating an innovation mindset.
and Marketing Mix Ideas (New York: Wiley, 2003. Co-author: Fernando Trias de Bes). It describes how companies can find really new ideas by doing out of- the-box thinking, rather than just making more versions of the same product. It is the difference between making another box of breakfast cereal with a different mix versus suddenly creating a candy bar made of breakfast cereal and chocolate. Companies need to increase their ratio of lateral thinking to old-fashion vertical thinking.
Bron: www.businessinsights.biz
Any other thoughts you would like to share with our readers? In 2003, I have published: Lateral Marketing: A New Approach to Finding Product, Market, 21 MBA in één dag | Philip Kotler
MBA in één dag: ultrakort en tóch volledig Wat verklaart het succes van MBA in één dag? Waarin zit de kracht? MBA in één dag biedt antwoord op twee fundamentele vragen van managers: Vraag 1: Hoe blijf ik bij? U heeft een méér dan volle werkweek. Het bijhouden van de managementliteratuur schiet er dan bij in. Dat is logisch, maar ook zonde. Want juist met de inzichten uit managementboeken kunt u effectiever en slimmer werken. En dat bespaart weer veel tijd. Maar welke boeken zijn écht goed en relevant voor u als manager? Hoe scheidt u het kaf van het koren? Wat moet u lezen en wat niet? Iemand moet een selectie maken. Vraag 2: Hoe zat het ook alweer? Tijdens uw opleiding heeft u de boeken van goeroes als Henry Mintzberg, Philip Kotler of Michael Porter gelezen. Maar dat is alweer een hele tijd geleden. Terwijl u juist nú deze kennis zou kunnen toepassen: hoe geef ik beter leiding? Hoe organiseer ik mijn bedrijf het beste? Hoe communiceer ik de strategie van mijn organisatie? Eigenlijk zouden Mintzberg, Kotler, Porter en al die anderen eens opnieuw voorbij moeten komen. Bijblijven + opfrissen = MBA in één dag In ‘MBA in één dag’ smelten deze twee vragen samen in een wervelend seminarprogramma. Ben Tiggelaar behandelt de greatest hits in management. Hij selecteerde de beste inzichten uit acht meter managementboeken met maar één criterium: wat kan een manager hier praktisch mee? Morgen al! Daarmee is MBA in één dag uitgegroeid tot de snelste manier om managementkennis op te frissen en aan te scherpen. Een MBA-opleiding in één dag: dat kan toch niet? Uiteraard is dit seminar geen volwaardige MBA opleiding. En u krijgt ook geen titel om achter uw naam te zetten. Maar toch: managen is een praktisch vak en MBA in één dag is ontdaan van alle fratsen die veel opleidingen zo onnodig hoogdravend maken. Méér dan de inzichten uit dit seminar heeft u niet nodig om effectief te zijn als manager.
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‘MBA in één dag’ staat onder de bevlogen leiding van bestsellerauteur en toptrainer Ben Tiggelaar. Ben verzorgt sprankelende seminars waarin hij ‘inhoud’ en ‘vorm’ op een perfecte manier samenbrengt. Een dag Tiggelaar is beslist géén luierdag: Ben hanteert een hoog tempo en presenteert ontzettend veel inzichten, eyeopeners en praktische tips. Hij brengt zijn verhaal daarnaast op een bevlogen, enthousiaste en interactieve manier, waardoor u toch de hele dag op het puntje van uw stoel zit.
Reacties Dit zeggen deelnemers over Ben Tiggelaars ‘MBA in één dag’... “Met een TGV door managementland!” Martijn Kamp, Getronics PinkRoccade “Waanzinnig interessant. Een waardevolle vertaalslag van zoveel ‘guru’ informatie.” Marinus van der Steen, Ministerie van Defensie “Hier heb ik jaren naar uitgekeken! Geweldige opstap naar verdere verdieping. Uitermate motiverend om een stapje terug te doen van de day-to-day brandblusmomenten.” Karel Burger, Nielsen Nederland “Bomvol. Genoeg ideeën opgedaan om komend jaar mee vooruit te kunnen.” Marie Jose Klaren, Universiteit Leiden “Beste scholing van de laatste vijf jaar!” A. Janse, Chr. Scholengemeenschap Vincent van Gogh “Super. Volledige overview. Ultrasnel. Precies zoals ik het wilde.” Aad van den Boogaart, Aranea Consult
Ga naar www.mbain1dag.nl voor Meen uitgebreid programma B A i n één dag | Robert Kaplan
Interview
Ben Tiggelaar
MBA in één dag®
Philip Kotler
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