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 Marketing

Andrew 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 Maslow

Andrew Mitrak: Who are some of the leaders th...