The Hindu Business Line : Cos should see marketing as a strategic function: Kotler

MANAGEMENTSPEAK: (From right) Dr Philip Kotler, management expert; Ms Stephanie Kelly, Vice-President, North America Human Resources, CTS; and Mr Krish Venkat, Vice-President, CTS, at a press conference in Chennai on Monday. — Bijoy Ghosh

Chennai , July 17

Marketing guru Dr Philip Kotler is emphatic that unless companies see marketing as a strategic function that starts from the CEO downward the discipline will not find a place in corporate boardrooms.

Instead of a financial scorecard that most boards of directors discuss, he says that it is important to develop a marketing scorecard. "That's what the board should listen to because that's the future and if you're not going to listen to that your next financial scorecard will look worse," he says.

On a whirlwind trip in Chennai, where the 75-year-old Dr Kotler, the S.C. Johnson & Son distinguished professor international marketing at the Kellogg School of Management and widely regarding as the father of modern marketing, addressed a series of workshops, book launches, media meets and seminars, he underscored the fact that most companies use marketing only as a basis for advertising and selling without much financial thinking behind it.

Marketing scorecard

Addressing the media after software company Cognizant's leadership workshop, Dr Kotler said: "Some companies regard marketing as a strategic position; both IBM and GE have a voice in the boardroom; it depends on how a company sees marketing. One of the ways I advice marketing to market itself is to introduce the idea of a marketing scorecard." He said a financial scorecard about sales and revenue is history. "What you really want to know is what's happening to customers; are you losing them, or are they satisfied, are they spending more or less. Every board meeting should have a marketing scorecard."

Stress on technology

Later addressing the media post a book launch of Dr Kotler's Marketing Management Twelfth Edition with a South Asian perspective, he said that marketing was undergoing some fundamental changes. He said that companies must get its marketers to understand finance better as they need to explain to the board the cost of good marketing and the returns it can give. Also, marketing is getting more technical and marketers need to understand technology better and how to use it.

The new book, published by Pearson Education, is an adaptation of Kotler's original book Marketing Management, co-authored by Prof Kevin Lane Keller and has been `Indianised' by Prof Abraham Koshy of IIM-A and Prof Mithileshwar Jha of IIM-B.

Announcing the launch of the book, the CEO of Pearson Education, Mr Subroto Mozumdar, said no book can come close to Dr Kotler's masterpiece on Marketing. Speaking on the necessity for adapting, Prof Koshy said though marketing concepts know no geographical boundaries and are basic for any country, some case studies and some examples of brands and companies needed to be changed to enable "our students understand the concept better and relate them to closer examples."

Apart from that, he said, there are concepts such as socio-economic classification and rural marketing, unique to India, which had to be incorporated. "We have not tinkered with any of Dr Kotler's basic concepts of marketing in the original book, but only adapted some of them to our context," Mr Jha said.

Dr Kotler earlier prefaced his speech with a telling anecdote. Asked by the CEO of a company to autograph his 1967 edition of Marketing Management, Dr Kotler said he refused and instead told him to buy the Twelfth Edition. Rather miffed, the CEO asked if he was trying to sell him another book. "I told him the revised edition will give him more value. Compared to this, the earlier book is primitive."

He said that book didn't have anything much of branding or market segmentation, the Internet hadn't happened, there was nothing on B2B commerce.

"Algebra hasn't changed in 2,000 years, but marketing has," he emphasised, "I update my books by always asking what is new." His later books, he said, talks about new marketing phenomena like e.marketing, direct marketing, tele and blog marketing, podcasting and product placement.