Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Darwin vs Kotler: The better marketing guru


As a marketing student the first thing that s fed into your head is the 4p's, Philip Kotlers breakthrough principle of marketing.After he published this theory in his book "Marketing management" in 1967, He was hailed as a marketing guru and his book is used a a standard reference for marketing graduates till date.Well all of this is quite a few feathers in Mr Kotlers cap, But in my eyes he s not much of a marketer. To begin with until i started research for this post i had no idea what he looked like, now how good a marketer could he be if he is nt recognizable, well lets ignore that quip and focus more on core marketing, the 4 P's,lets look at Google one of the worlds most successful companies till date,they don t really sell a product in fact its a service that facilitates giving you information that s not published by Google. The second P, Price Google offers its services to its customers for free,At this point Mr Kotler must be pulling whatever hair he has left.Now place,Google has no physical presence and exists online hence the place is the world wide web which if you think of it does nt really fit the bill to what Kotler intended. Finally Promotion, Google rarely advertises in any media and it has established its popularity by its sheer efficiency of service and not by advertising.well so much for the 4 P's.in today's business environment management and marketing principles need to be flexible as organizations have begun to function in dynamic ways.Now Charles Darwin got it right.Way back in 1831 when he was traveling across south America he formulated the theory of natural selection, Which stated that living beings made decisions based of viability and compatibility. This seems as a more appropriate principle for marketing as it can be universally applied as these two criteria focuses on the consumer and how he relates to the product which is overlooked by most marketing gurus,In modern marketing principles the pre determined mindset of the consumer is overlooked which Leeds to marketing strategies biting the dust, The irony of the whole situation is that a naturalist discovered the key to good marketing over a century before today's top marketing guru.