Review of Marketing Management: First European Edition

This report is a comprehensive book review of "Marketing Management: First European Edition" by Kotler, Keller, Brady, Goodman, and Hansen, submitted by Fathimathul Irfana C. The review begins with an introduction to the evolution of marketing, tracing its roots from early selling practices to the modern era of digital marketing and branding. It then provides detailed biographical information on the authors, highlighting their contributions to the field. The core of the report is an analysis of the book's content, emphasizing its relevance to European marketing challenges and its reflection of changes in marketing theory and practice. The review covers key aspects of the book, including the marketing mix, relationship marketing, and the importance of customer-perceived value. It concludes with a personal viewpoint on the book's strengths and weaknesses. The report emphasizes the book's comprehensive and engaging nature, making it a valuable resource for students and practitioners alike.

Book Review
Marketing Management: First European Edition
P. Kotler, K. Lane Keller, M. Brady, M. R. V. Goodman, and T. Hansen
ISBN 9780273718567
Submitted
By
Fathimathul Irfana C.
Reg. No. MDATDCM102
Enrollment No. 1980647
SCHOOL OF DISTANCE EDUCATION
UNIVERSITY OF CALICUT

INTRODUCTION
Humans stand out from other living beings by their peculiar nature of brain activities. Through
the evolution they continuously utelise the power of thinking to ease and comfort day-to-day life.
To give an immediate example, consider how people travel from one point to another. Earlier, we
used our foot to travel killometers. Soon we realized one can exploit animals such as horses and
donkeys for the purpose. After the discovery of wheels, the style of traveling took a leap! Now,
we can literally fly at an unbelievable speed. A lot had happened when the cave men became the
modern people. The life style is now more structured, and we worry about social and
economical stabilities. We have learned a lot! We make energy from the nucleus of atoms, and
we talk about black holes. Medical field has made unbelievable advancements. What about
economics? The story of economics is not different from other aspects. Let’s focus on one of the
important branches of economic studies, i.e., Marketing! In some ways marketing is as old as
civilization itself. Selling/buying activities were established long ago. Of course these traders
would not have called their activities marketing and their activities may seem far removed from
someone ordering airline tickets via a website.
The concept of marketing that we now see has more to do with developments during the
industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries. This was a period of rapid social change
driven by technological and scientific innovation ( BBC history website is an excellent source to
look at). One result was that for the first time the production of goods was separated from their
consumption. Mass production, developing transport infrastructure and growing mass media
meant that producers needed to, and could develop more sophisticated ways of managing the
distribution of goods.
The world of marketing began to change during the 1990s. A product or service was created and
instantly a brand was developed. Companies began to realize they could focus on selling more
high-quality products and build a better brand for them. This resulted in companies experiencing
an improvement in their margins, but also expanded their reputation. It also increased the
awareness of the brand they had created. Some companies with a private label were able to
improve their market share by more than 49 percent (wikipedia).

With the evolution of the web, websites started being an essential tool for commercialization.
During the late 1990s, simple company websites that were text-based began to flourish. They
were initially utilized to provide information about a company’s products or services. As the
number of websites increased and it became harder to attract the attention on visitors who arrived
on the internet, it no longer became good enough to just have a website. You needed to
implement online marketing strategies to stand out from the crowd.
Marketing management is an ever growing field of study, that require a serious attention. Here, I
review one of the outstanding text books on marketing management. “Marketing Management”
by P. Kotler, K. Lane Keller, M. Brady, M. R. V. Goodman, and T. Hansen. The book is
comprehensive, current, and engaging. The review report is presented as follows: I, we briefly
introduce the authors followed by a fairly detailed description of some general aspects presented
in the text including important ideas and concepts in the field of marketing. I will try to
summarize the book before presenting my personal view points.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Philip Kotler is the S. C. Johnson Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the
Kellogg School of Management. He has been honored as one of the world's leading marketing
thinkers. He received his M.A. degree in economics (1953) from the University of Chicago and
his Ph.D. degree in economics (1956) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.)
and has received honorary degrees from twenty-one foreign universities. He is the author of over
57 books and over one hundred and fifty articles. He has been a consultant to IBM, General
Electric, Sony, AT&T, Bank of America, Merck, Motorola, Ford, and others. The Financial
Times included him in its list of the top 10 business thinkers.
Kotler is known for popularizing the definition of the marketing mix. Besides, he helped to
create the field of social marketing that focuses on helping individuals and groups modify their
behaviors toward healthier and safer living styles. He also created the concept of "demarketing"
to aid in the task of reducing the level of demand. He also developed the concepts of
"prosumers," "atmospherics," and "societal marketing." He is regarded as, "The Father of
Modern Marketing" by many scholars. His three major contributions to the field of marketing
and management are; First, he has done more than any other writer or scholar to promote the
importance of marketing, transforming it from a peripheral activity, bolted on to the more
"important" work of production. Second, he continued a trend started by Peter Drucker, shifting
emphasis away from price and distribution to a greater focus on meeting customers' needs and on
the benefits received from a product or service. Third, he has broadened the concept of
marketing from more selling to a general process of communication and exchange and has
shown how marketing can be extended and applied to charities, museums, performing arts
organizations, political parties, and many other non-commercial situations.
He has been Chairman of the College of Marketing of the Institute of Management Sciences, a
Director of the American Marketing Association, a Trustee of the Marketing Science Institute, a
Director of the MAC Group, a member of the Yankelovich Advisory Board, and a member of the
Copernicus Advisory Board. He was a member of the Board of Governors of the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago and a member of the Advisory Board of the Drucker Foundation. He has

traveled extensively throughout Europe, Asia, and South America, advising and lecturing to
many companies about global marketing opportunities.
Kevin Lane Keller is the E. B. Osborn Professor of Marketing at the Tuck School of Business at
Dartmouth College. Professor Keller has degrees from Cornell, Carnegie-Mellon, and Duke
universities. At Dartmouth, he teaches MBA courses on marketing management and strategic
brand management and lectures in executive programs on those topics.
Professor Keller’s general area of expertise lies in marketing strategy and planning and
branding. His specific research interest is in how understanding theories and concepts related to
consumer behavior can improve marketing strategies. His research has been published in three of
the major marketing journals – the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Marketing Research,
and the Journal of Consumer Research. He also has served on the Editorial Review Boards of
those journals. With over 60 published papers, his research has been widely cited and has
received numerous awards. Two of his articles, ‘Consumer evaluations of brand extensions and
‘Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity’ were named by
INFORMS Society for Marketing Science in March 2007 to its list of Top 20 marketing science
papers written in the past 25 years that have most affected the practice of marketing science.
Professor Keller is acknowledged as one of the international leaders in the study of brands,
branding, and strategic brand management. Actively involved with the industry, he has worked
on a host of different types of marketing projects. He has served as a consultant and advisor to
marketers for some of the world’s most successful brands, including Accenture, American
Express, Disney, Ford, Intel, Levi Strauss, Procter & Gamble, and SAB Miller. Additional brand
consulting activities have been with other top companies such as Allstate, Beiersdorf (Nivea),
BlueCross BlueShield, Campbell’s, Eli Lilly, ExxonMobil, General Mills, Goodyear, Kodak,
Mayo Clinic, Nordstrom, Shell Oil, Starbucks, Unilever, and Young & Rubicam. He has also
served as an academic trustee for the Marketing Science Institute. A popular speaker, he has
conducted marketing seminars to top executives in a variety of forums.
Mairead Brady is a lecturer in Marketing at the School of Business, Trinity College Dublin. She
holds a Ph.D. from the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, which she completed under the
supervision of Professors Michael Saren and Nikolaos Tzokas.

She lectures at undergraduate to post-experience Masters's level and supervises Ph.D. students.
She is a lead lecturer on the Master in International Business, a joint Trinity College and
Enterprise Ireland program targeted at high potential Irish businesses. She also lectures at the
IMI (Irish Management Institute) to business practitioners. She provides marketing expertise to
innovators and entrepreneurs within universities in Ireland through her work with the Innovation
C entre at Trinity College.
Malcolm Robert Victor Goodman teaches both undergraduates and postgraduates at the
University of Durham in the UK. His specialist subjects are business creativity, organizational
change, and marketing. He is an external examiner for the Edward de Bono Institute of
Creativity at the University of Malta.
He graduated in economics after submitting a practical marketing study on the cricket bat and
ball industries of Britain designed to explore the gap between theoretical knowledge and its
application to the real world. This became the springboard for a lifetime interest in the practical
application of marketing concepts and techniques. Professor Goodman also holds the Diploma
from the UK’s Chartered Institute of Marketing.
Torben Hansen is a Professor at the Department of Marketing, Copenhagen Business School
(CBS). He received his Bachelor's and Master's degrees from the University of Southern
Denmark and his Ph.D. from Copenhagen Business School. His main fields of research are
consumer behavior and marketing research methods and his papers have appeared in various
academic journals, examples include International Journal of Consumer Studies, European
Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Behaviour, Journal of Foodservice Business
Research, Journal of Product & Brand Management, Journal of International Consumer
Marketing, Journal of Euro marketing, International Journal of Retail & Distribution
Management, British Food Journal, The International Review of Retail Distribution and
Consumer Research, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services and others, along with a
number of chapters in scholarly books. He has authored or co-authored several books, including
New Perspectives in Retailing – A Study of the Interface between Consumers and Retailers. He is
a frequent speaker at national and international conferences and community forums.

MARKETING MANAGEMENT- THE BOOK
As mentioned before, the American edition of Marketing Management is the world’s leading
marketing text. Its content and organization consistently reflect changes in marketing theory and
practice. This new European Edition of Marketing Management has been inspired by the
American edition and explores the challenges facing European marketing practitioners. Increased
global competition for business in European markets has led to a need for firms to develop
market offerings that are specially tailored to meet the requirements of individual countries and
customers. In the sellers’ markets of yesteryear, the competition was less pronounced and many
firms concentrated on becoming cost-effective performers. This led to the formation of a mindset
known as the least-cost production paradigm.
The paradigm change to and toward buyers’ markets calls for marketers to provide customers
with what they want and has become a challenge for supplying firms. It usually requires
additional costs and may also involve substantial changes to their modus operandi. Additional
costs are entailed as firms seek to meet customer-perceived value requirements. This normally
entails offering a carefully tailored package of product and service benefits and places increased
importance on relationship marketing. The task of marketers is to discover accurately what their
targeted customers want and then to develop appropriate market offerings by effective
applications of the marketing mix. The marketing of services has assumed great importance in
most developed western economies and increasingly so across the world as the leading emerging
economies gather strength. Service benefits have become of greater importance as a means of
increasing the customer-perceived value of offerings made by traditional product marketing
firms.
The onward march of digital technology has had a pro- found effect on the practice of marketing.
Firms now sell goods and services through a variety of direct and indirect channels. Mass
advertising is increasingly giving way to new forms of communication as information and
communication technologies (ICT) gathers momentum. Communi- cation has become truly
two-way and customers are reporting more and more to other customers what they think of

specific companies and market offerings using email, blogs, podcasts, and other digital media to
do so.
In response, companies are moving from managing product or service portfolios to relationship
marketing. They do so by managing customer portfolios, compiling databases on individual
customers in order to be able to finetune their offerings and messages to meet bespoke needs.
They are replacing traditional sellers’ market product and service standardization with more
sophisticated marketing. The drive toward effectiveness (meeting the individual requirements of
customers) is potentially expensive if pursued in an undisciplined fashion. Marketers are paying
increased attention to efficiency and developing marketing metrics to measure their performance
on key operative functions such as customer profitability and lifetime value. Monitoring payback
on specific marketing decisions can be difficult due to the nature of the variables that influence
customer buying behavior and the contextual dynamics and complexities of individual markets.
However, it is important for firms to seek improved methods to measure the return on their
marketing investment and its impact on shareholder value.
As companies change their thinking in the light of emerging customer demands in buyers’
markets, they give increased attention to changing their marketing organization. Marketing is
increasingly being seen as a company-wide rather than a functional activity. It drives the
company’s vision, mission, and strategic planning. Marketing is about identifying and
consistently delivering appropriate customer-perceived value offerings to targeted customers.
This involves a host of vital decisions such as who the company wants as its customers; which of
their needs to satisfy; what products and services to offer; what process to design; what
communications to send and receive; what channels of distribution to use; and what partnerships
to develop. Marketing can only succeed when all functions in an organization work in a holistic
way as a team with the single aim of consistently pleasing or delighting their customers by
balancing the concepts of effectiveness and efficiency. In order to achieve this successfully
marketers practice marketing management on a national, international, and often a global scale.
The authors define the term Marketing Management as follows:
Marketing management is the development, design, and implementation of marketing programs,
processes, and activities that recognize the breadth and interdependencies of the business
environment. Four key dimensions and operating attitudes define the task:

1. Internal marketing: ensuring everyone in the organization consistently embraces
appropriate marketing principles, especially senior management.
2. Integrated marketing: ensuring that the best possible way of utilizing the marketing mix
is employed to consistently deliver market offerings that continually delight customers.
3. Relationship marketing: developing sound and lasting relationships with all the members
of the firm’s value chain, customers, and other marketing partners.
4. Performance marketing: the design and application of marketing metrics to gauge the
costs and returns of marketing activities.
Marketing management recognizes that ‘everything matters’ with marketing and that a broad,
integrated perspective is often necessary. Therefore, these four dimensions are woven throughout
the book. The text specifically addresses the following tasks that constitute the essence of
modern marketing management in the 21st century:
1. Understanding marketing management;
2. Capturing marketing insights;
3. Connecting with customers;
4. Building strong brands;
5. Shaping the market offering;
6. Delivering value;
7. Communicatingvalue;and
8. Managing marketing, implementation, and control.
The most significant organizational changes in the first European edition are: all chapters provide
a European focus and include illustrations drawn from European companies.
● The text argues the case for marketing management in Europe and explores its practice
through the use of the expanded 7P marketing mix. The service-dominant logic is
explored in this capacity.

● The aim of marketing management is the provision of customer-perceived value offerings
to both consumer and business-to-business customers.
● Modern technological developments have provided marketing management with an array
of tools including Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and several digital
advances that have revolutionized market research, product and service development,
supply and communication practice.
● As marketing management becomes more crucial in Europe there is a need to make sure
that marketing initiatives are both effective and efficient. The text devotes a whole
chapter to exploring marketing metrics.
● To complement the use of digital technologies the book provides a window into the
increasing use of creative marketing techniques as companies seek to develop and sustain
innovatory products/services and processes.
● A selection of topic templates including formats to encourage readers to practice drawing
up marketing plans are also included. A set of European videos, case studies, and
exercises are featured to help readers bridge the gap between knowledge and practice.

SUMMARY
I will briefly summarize the ideas presented in the text as follows:
Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating,
communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships
in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders. Marketing management is the art
and science of choosing target markets and getting, keeping, and growing customers through
creating, delivering, and communicating superior customer value. Marketers are skilled at
managing demand: they seek to influence its level, timing, and composition for goods,
services, events, experiences, persons, places, properties, organizations, information, and
ideas. They also operate in four different marketplaces: consumer, business, global, and
nonprofit. Marketing is not done only by the marketing department. It needs to affect every
aspect of the customer experience. To create a strong marketing organization, marketers must
think like executives in other departments, and executives in other departments must think
more like marketers. Today’s marketplace is fundamentally different as a result of major
societal forces that have resulted in many new consumer and company capabilities. These
forces have created new opportunities and challenges and changed marketing management
significantly as companies seek new ways to achieve marketing excellence. There are five
competing concepts under which organizations can choose to conduct their business: the
production concept, the product concept, the selling concept, the marketing concept, and the
holistic marketing concept. The first three are of limited use today. The holistic marketing
concept is based on the development, design, and implementation of marketing programs,
processes, and activities that recognize their breadth and interdependencies. Holistic
marketing recognizes that everything matters in marketing and that a broad, integrated
perspective is often necessary. Four components of holistic marketing are relationship
marketing, integrated marketing, internal marketing, and socially responsible marketing. The
set of tasks necessary for successful marketing management includes developing marketing
strategies and plans, capturing marketing insights, connecting with customers, building
strong brands, shaping the market offerings, delivering and communicating value, and

creating long-term growth. Further, The value delivery process includes choosing (or
identifying), providing (or delivering), and communicating superior value. A value chain is a
tool for identifying key activities that create value and costs in a specific business. According
to one view, holistic marketing maximizes value exploration by understanding the
relationships between the customer’s cognitive space, the company’s competence space, and
the collaborator’s resource space; maximizes value creation by identifying new customer
benefits from the customer’s cognitive space, utilizing core competencies from its business
domain, and selecting and managing business partners from its collaborative networks; and
maximizes value delivery by becoming proficient at customer relationship management,
internal resource management, and business partnership management.
The author continues. Companies can conduct their own marketing research or hire other
companies to do it for them. Good marketing research is characterized by the scientific method,
creativity, multiple research methods, accurate model building, cost-benefit analysis, healthy
skepticism, and an ethical focus. The marketing research process consists of defining the
problem, decision alternatives; and research objectives; developing the research plan; collecting
the information; analyzing the information; presenting the findings to management, and making
the decision. Also, Target marketing includes three activities: market segmentation, market
targeting, and market positioning. Market segments are large, identifiable groups within a
market. Two bases for segmenting consumer markets are consumer characteristics and consumer
responses. The major segmentation variables for consumer markets are geographic,
demographic, psychographic, and behavioral. Marketers use them singly or in combination.
Business marketers use all these variables along with operating variables, purchasing
approaches, and situational factors. To be useful, market segments must be measurable,
substantial, accessible, differentiable, and actionable. Despite the increased role of nonprice
factors in modern marketing, the price remains a critical element of marketing. Price is the only
element that produces revenue; the others produce costs. Pricing decisions have become more
challenging, however, in a changing economic and technological environment. In setting a
pricing policy, a company follows a six-step procedure. It selects its pricing objective. It
estimates the demand curve, the probable quantities it will sell at each possible price. It estimates
how its costs vary at different levels of output, at different levels of accumulated production
experience, and for differentiated marketing offers. It examines competitors’ costs, prices, and