Philip Kotler is the S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. At first he taught economics, but then Northwestern asked him to teach marketing and to bring more economics into it. Although now best known as a marketing guru, by passion and education, Kotler has always been an economist—having received both his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics and been trained by three Nobel economists. He received his master’s from the University of Chicago, where he studied under the famed Nobel laureate and free-market evangelist Milton Friedman; he then pursued his Ph.D. in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the Nobel Prize-winning Keynesian economists Paul Samuelson and Robert Solow. Kotler then did post-doctoral work in mathematics and behavioral science at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, respectively.
As Kotler explains, the clear connection between marketing and economics is that marketing simply applies behavioral economics to understanding how consumers and producers make economic decisions in the marketplace. In marketing, he points out, we cover product innovation, pricing, channels of distribution, consumer economics, promotion, international trade, monopolistic competition, and many other areas of economics. In the emerging field of behavioral economics, essentially, Kotler is and has always been a behavioral economist.
Dr. Kotler has received honorary degrees from twenty-one foreign universities, and has consulted for countless companies, including General Electric, IBM, Merck, AT&T, Sony, Bank of America, Motorola, Ford, and many others. He has lectured extensively in India, China, Brazil, and Mexico, and in various other Asian, European, South American, and Middle Eastern countries. The Financial Times has included him in its list of Top 10 business thinkers.
He has authored more than 50 books, including his bestseller Marketing Management, which Financial Times cited as one of the 50 best business books of all time. Translated or adapted into more than 20 languages, it was the most widely adopted book around the world in MBA courses. Kotler’s economics books include Marketing Decision Making (a treatise identifying the major factors that influence demand); Marketing Your Way to Growth; Winning Global Markets; Up and Out of Poverty; and now, Confronting Capitalism.