Coming soon · Book Profile
Marketing Management
A comprehensive managerial guide to modern marketing that frames marketing as a holistic, value-creating discipline tasked with identifying and meeting customer needs profitably amid the new realities of technology, globalization, and social responsibility.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Marketing Management, the field's market-leading text by Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, casts marketing not as a departmental afterthought but as a company-wide value-delivery process at the heart of strategy. Balancing classic frameworks—segmentation, targeting, positioning, the marketing mix, brand equity—with the new marketing realities of digital media, emerging markets, and corporate social responsibility, the book equips readers with conceptual tools and rich real-world examples to make rigorous, customer-centric marketing decisions. Through its holistic marketing concept (relationship, integrated, internal, and performance marketing), it shows how every choice about customers, brands, channels, communications, and pricing must reinforce one another to create, deliver, and communicate superior customer value at a profit. It is the definitive reference for understanding how to build strong brands, connect with customers, and grow a business responsibly for the long run.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A marketing manager or business student who wants to create demand, build strong brands, and grow a loyal, profitable customer base in a rapidly changing marketplace.
- The problem
- Customers, competitors, technology, and economic forces change rapidly, and there is little margin for error in choosing markets, features, prices, channels, and communications. They feel overwhelmed by the pace of change and uncertain whether their marketing efforts will deliver demonstrable results and justify their budgets.
- The plan
- Develop marketing strategies and plans grounded in customer value.
- Capture marketing insights through information systems, research, and demand forecasting.
- Connect with consumer and business customers and build long-term loyalty.
- Build strong brands through segmentation, targeting, positioning, and brand equity.
- Create, deliver, and communicate value via products, services, channels, pricing, and integrated communications.
- The payoff
- A strong brand and a loyal, profitable customer base that drives sustainable growth. · Marketing investments that are accountable, measurable, and value-creating. · An organization aligned around delivering superior customer value responsibly.
See our guide
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Additional reading
- Blue Ocean Strategy · W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
The book explicitly references and explains this strategic framework for creating 'uncontested market spaces,' presenting it as an alternative to head-to-head competition.
- Competitive Strategy · Michael Porter
The book recommends this text for readers who wish to explore the vital subject of competitive strategy in more depth, which is an essential prerequisite to setting appropriate marketing objectives.
- The Marketing Audit: translating marketing theory into practice · Malcolm H. B. McDonald
Mentioned in the preface as a companion text to this book, containing exercises designed to provide a practical bridge between marketing theory and practice for managers.
- Marketing in the Service Sector · John M. Rathmell
Cited frequently throughout the book as a foundational text that helped establish services marketing as a distinct field of study in the 1970s.
- Breaking Free from Product Marketing · G. Lynn Shostack
This seminal 1977 'Journal of Marketing' article is referenced by many authors in the proceedings for its powerful argument that services require a fundamentally different marketing approach and for introducing conceptual tools like 'molecular modeling'.
- The Marketing of Professional Services · Aubrey Wilson
This 1972 book is cited as a pioneering work specifically addressing the unique challenges of marketing for professionals like consultants, recognizing that the 'product' is often inseparable from the provider.
- Marketing for Nonprofit Organizations · Philip Kotler
This book is referenced as the key text that extended marketing thought to the nonprofit sector, providing the theoretical underpinnings for many of the papers in the book's nonprofit track.
- Marketing Myopia · Theodore Levitt
This classic article is cited for its central theme of defining a business by the customer benefits it provides rather than the products it makes, a concept particularly crucial for service businesses which sell intangible benefits.
- Scientific Advertising · Claude Hopkins
Ogilvy states this book changed the course of his life and that no one should be allowed in advertising without reading it seven times. It establishes the principle of advertising as measurable 'salesmanship in print'.
- Tested Advertising Methods · John Caples
Ogilvy quotes Caples on the vast difference in sales results between ads and recommends his book for guidance on writing effective headlines.