Marketing As Strategy

PREFACE

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery; None but ourselves can free our minds.

—Bob Marley, Redemption Song

MARKETING HAS FASCINATED ME since I was seventeen years old and discovered the second edition of Philip Kotler’s Marketing Management. Almost a decade later, Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management admitted me to its marketing Ph.D. program. While the doctoral program exhilarated me overall, one aspect of it frequently troubled me—we seldom discussed marketing. With a few exceptions, notably Jim Anderson, George Day, Philip Kotler, John Quelch, Jagdish Sheth, Lou Stern, and Fred Webster, most marketing academics did not focus on the issues important to practitioners.

To learn the messy practice of business, ...