Philip Kotler on Marketing and the 4 Ps

America knows how to market itself, its products, and its ideas. For better or for worse, for richer or poorer, American marketing creativity, power, and prestige influence consumers the world over. Philip Kotler, best known for the marketing principle of the four Ps — product, price, promotion, and place —takes us on a guided tour of American marketing, including its origins and trends, its relationship to economics, and its criticisms. His talk will include examples of exemplary marketing. Kotler is professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and his textbooks serve as the basis for graduate business programs worldwide.

Contents

Philip Kotler: Marketing

There will be two groups, with respect to marketing. There will be a group that doesn’t like marketing, and I’m going to give you why they don’t like marketing and the justifications. I will also tell you there’s another group who loves marketing, so before we’re through, you will be totally confused, or at least opinionated. So, what I want to do is tell you that

These are called confessions of a marketer. That’s, by the way, borrowed from David Ogilvy, who wrote a wonderful book called “Confessions of an Advertising Man.” And let me move on and say why is marketing a topic for the humanities? And we would say that there’s a couple of reasons.

One: I regard marketing as a humanistic subject because marketing has affected our lifestyles; has created, not only affected a lifestyle, but created lifestyles, and we should be, from a point of view of popular interest, interested in that. And it really– I want to say that marketing is very American, that it’s beginnings are very American. That doesn’t mean there weren’t manifestations of marketing earlier, and as a matter of fact, I’d like to give you a very short history of marketing, so that you understand what we mean by the word. As a matter of fact, if you took a dictionary, a Webster’s dictionary, in the year 1900, and looked up the word marketing, you would not find it in the dictionary. Yes, you would find the word market, but not the word marketing. If you then picked a dictionary…

1910. You would find the word marketing in it, because marketing is about 100 years old. And it’s much more than selling. So let me show you… Let’s start… Let’s start biblically. Let’s start biblically. Who is the marketer in this picture? This is the biblical narrative. Who was the first marketer in the world? I hear Eve… The snake. I hate to admit it, because snake sounds like sneaky, and so on and so forth. But the fact is that it was the snake who sold Eve on getting Adam to eat an apple. So it goes way back. At least selling goes way back. Now let’s go further. Here is the father of marketing. Wow, what an insult to him! I mean, that’s Aristotle. Recently I was at a group, little party, and we were speculating who we would like to meet most if we had an hour with such a person, and it boiled down to Plato, Socrates, or Aristotle. That’s a hard one. It turns out that my vote went for Aristotle. Aristotle was Google, at the time. He knew more about everything than anyone in the world. He wrote on science, politics, economics, rhetoric, art, and everything. Now, why do I say that he had some marketing impact?

Let me read the definition of rhetoric. He’s not the founder of rhetoric, by the way. The founders were the sophists, around 600 B.C. They were a group who wanted to use selling and speech and persuasion for their own devious ends. But Aristotle put the i– the discipline of rhetoric on its feet. Rhetoric is the art that aims to improve the facility of speakers or writers who attempt to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. It is the faculty of the observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion. So, in a sense, he could be the father of selling.

The idea of getting someone to do something that they might not have done otherwise. So, let’s move on, about other early manifestations of marketing. I know many of you cannot necessarily read this, so I will read it, but the first department store opened when, and in what country? Normally if you’re in France and you ask the question, they would say of course we invented the department store. It was about 1845.

The same time we invented paperweights and some other things. But it turns out that the first department store was in Japan. Mitsui company, which is still alive and well. So that’s where one of our retailing forms started. The next one is the first newspaper that carried an ad. There were newspapers early, but the first ad appeared in England, in 1652, and it advertised coffee. And then, the first ad agency started a little later. Well, much later. N.W. Ayer, which is still a prosperous advertising agency. First time a brand was put on a commodity, the commodity being soap, the brand name was Pear’s soap. And then the first packaging appeared a little later, and finally we had a marketing research department formed. So, now the word markets has been around all these years.

The Middle Ages had markets. In fact, whenever– I would even say the agora, in ancient Greece– that means the marketplace– In ancient Greece, people would come on a particular day to sell things. In the Middle Ages, there were market days. The word marketing wasn’t there. It was just market. And trade was always there, because trade, through history, has taken place between people and regions and countries. So all that is there, and it was in the decade of the 1900s that marketing books first appeared. And the interesting thing is who wrote those first marketing books.

Were they sociologists? What was the discipline of the people who wrote the first marketing books? Any guesses? They weren’t physicists or chemists. They were economists. So why would economists start a subject called marketing? And the answer is: they were disillusioned economists. They couldn’t find any mention of advertising in the discourse of economists. In other words, never did Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, even Alfred Marshall, and so on, they rarely talked about other forces that shaped demand. The only force that shaped demand in their mind was price. You know the famous curve. Raise the price, demand will go down, lower the price, you can sell more. Price was the only thing that affected demand. So these economists, or institutional economists, said “Hey, you’ve got to factor in advertising.” You’ve got to factor in retail stores, whole sales, jobbers, agents. And it was the neglect of the classical economists to not really texture the marketplace and the way an economy worked that led to marketing. So marketing is technically a branch of economics. Now who helped developed this field of marketing? Now, probably you don’t recognize maybe anyone here. There’s one person you might recognize. I don’t know if you can see some of these faces, but someone recognize anyone there?.

Dale Carnegie “How to Win Friends and Influence People”

Dale Carnegie is here, and his book was “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” because in doing this, I wanted to find out who was the exemplar of the selling method. “How to Win Friends and Influence People” But let me give you the whole picture. Ernest Dichter. Some of you may know of. He was a motivational psychologist, and he could explain why people didn’t like to eat prunes, why cigars were offending some people, and all kinds of things. And his book called “The Study of Desire.” He apparently studied with Sigmund Freud, and he brought that kind of mind to marketing. But he had an opponent named Alfred Pollitz, who was not a head shrinker–We call him a… a nose counter. The expressions we would use if you were very psychological, you were a head shrinker, and otherwise, you were a nose counter. Namely, a surveyor. You surveyed– You found out what percentage of people were of a certain age and why did they buy a particular product. Julius Rosenwald was very much behind the formation of the Sears company, which was a important episode in the development of our retail chains.

Lester Wunderman – direct mail and catalogues

Lester Wunderman deserves credit as exemplifying the use of direct mail and catalogs. That you can sell more directly. You don’t have to be in the store. You can get people to order goods by mail and phone. David Ogilvy is the exemplar advertising person, then Stanley Marcus, of Neiman Marcus, was a fella who could walk into any retail store and give them 100 suggestions on how to improve the layout, the size of the aisles, and make a difference in the volume of business. Edward Bernays is the father of public relations in the United States. His name has sort of becoming obscure, but he really was a very important person. The word propaganda was often used in connection with his work, because people thought it was a model to motivate you to feel a certain way about anything, regardless of the standards involved.

And then there’s Dale Carnegie. In any case, how did marketing get its start? Marketing got its start in sales departments. Every company has a sales group. And the sales people really want to be in the office of a customer, because that’s the only way something happens. So they don’t want to do a lot of homework. For example, three things they didn’t want to do. They didn’t want to do consumer research in a systematic way, because that’s taking their time away from selling to customers.

Secondly, they would’ve liked someone else to find leads. Now a lead means a prospect. In fact, we distinguish between a hot lead: “Oh boy, he’s ready to buy. He even called us to buy.” a warm lead, a cold lead, so on. Someone else should do that for the salespeople, so they don’t waste their time making calls. And the third thing was someone had to prepare brochures and ads. And the salesman is not skilled. The salesperson isn’t skilled at communicating through advertising and brochures.

Marketing departments and job titles

So sales departments added three people or hired them from time to time. Later on, it exploded to the day today, when we have multinationals running– with marketing– In other words, marketing– Those three people split from sales and became big enough to become their own department. And so, some people in the audience here may be a chief marketing officers. The old name was Vice President of marketing, but I like the name chief marketing officer because that person now is part of the chief officers. Chief information officer, chief financial officer, chief innovation officer, and the status has moved up. Some of you may be brand managers, may have been in your past experience. Category managers, market segment managers, managing distribution channels, like retail or wholesale things, pricing manager, communication manager, database manager, direct marketers, internet people, and so on. So, marketing is well-established. Now, the character of a marketing department depends very much on what the CEO thinks of marketing. So, the 1P CEO is a person who took over a company, and he says, “I don’t like marketing, but I know I need it, and all I want from marketing is some communications. I just want someone to broadcast and promote us.”

Philip Kotler’s 4 Ps of Marketing

So, that person is missing a lot of other things made up by other CEOs, who are 4P CEOs. Now a 4P CEO says, “I need a marketing plan.” And the plan has to mention product–that’s the first P. What about our product? What’s good about it? What are the features? Price: what should it be priced at? Place: where should it be made accessible? Online, offline, in stores? And finally promotion. So that’s a more educated view of the potential of marketing. But there’s even a better view, and that’s called the CEO who says, “No! I don’t want to start with 4 Ps, I want to start with the fact the market is complex.” There’s a lot of segments. Each segment deserves its own plan. In fact, one thing we’ve learned that if you just have one value proposition for the whole market, it really doesn’t trigger anything in many parts of the market.

So that CEO says, “What segment should we go after? And what position should we take with each segment? What should we say about ourselves, in how we can satisfy their needs?” Now there’s even a higher type CEO, which is exemplified by A.G. Lafley, who ran Procter & Gamble, who recently retired. When you ask A.G. Lafley what’s marketing, what’s your picture, he says, “Well, what do you mean? Marketing is everything.” Now, marketing is everything. What he means is everything starts with the customer. No customers, no business. And I think he’s making that point very much. Now, moving on, there’s a lot of things that a chief marketing officer does, and I won’t go into any detail, but there’s a lot of tasks, and the sad fact is that sometimes the chief marketing officer only lasts on the average of two years. In other words, does a job, and maybe the CEO is not feeling that it really brought in enough new business that the cost of the CMO exceeds what the value of the CMO is. There’s a lot to go into about why CMOs on the average hold on to their job for two years.

By the way, some of them get a better job after two years. They become something higher than the chief marketing officer. Some of them actually are pirated away because they’re so good, they go to another company to be the CEO. But in any case, marketing– commercial marketing, which I’ve been talking about, could’ve stayed only commercial, and then I got involved in– with Professor Sid Levy at Northwestern We started the idea of broadening marketing, because the set of tools that we use to address consumers could be used in other areas. So we have a thing called place marketing. I will get a call from a city, let’s say, and a city says, “We’re not getting enough tourists. We don’t have any attractions for them to come and see. I would like to get a factory located here. We would like some digital people to move here, who know digital. We want to start a Silicon Valley.”

So that’s place marketing. The marketing of a place. How do you dress it up and make it attractive? Against all of the other competitive places. The second– Person marketing. There’s an agency called William Morris, and a young singer might go to William Morris and say, “look, I want to get ahead. I want to appear on Jay Leno’s show. I want to– I want to move up to being noticed. I want high visibility.” I wrote a book with the title “High Visibility.” How do you get that visibility. So, William Morris will look at her and her performance and maybe say, “You know, in a sense– Don’t be offended, but we can make you into a better product.” That’s sort of the language. You know, do your hair differently, walk a little– dress differently. Actually, we’re going to use you to reignite the archetype of Joan Baez. You know, Joan Baez, the folk singer. Well, we need a new Joan Baez. And so, we can recast you and form you into the kind of person we all miss, and so on. Now, social marketing is another branch.

Today there are 2,000 social marketers around the world, trying to help people eat better, exercise more, say no to drugs, stop smoking cigar– get off of tobacco, say no to a number of things. Positive behaviors and negative behaviors. By the way, my memory is that Sweden was one of the first countries to want to raise a nation of nonsmokers, non-drinkers, all the vices. And it starts at the primary school level, that you could technically raise people to avoid those vices, if that was thought to be good public policy. So that’s social marketing. Now, political marketing, we’re saturated with. And I think it’s degenerated, but that’s another thing. Fundraising is part of marketing. I mean, fundraising is an odd form, because you’re not exchanging. Everything else is sort of an exchange of values.

Fundraising seems to be a one-way transfer. Here’s some money for the museum. But any fundraiser knows there’s something that should come back to the person who is the donor and supporter of a museum, and working that way is important. So these are offshoots. Now all of us do marketing. If you read the list, we all do marketing. Did you ever compete for a job when you knew there were other applicants? Didn’t you dress up as well as you could and even prepare what you’re going to say, and so on? Did you compete for a desirable apartment which was scarce? Or a member of the opposite sex, if you wanted to court someone. So, in a sense, we’re human animals who know how to make an impression and market ourselves, to some extent. What do we dislike about marketing? Well, there’s a long list. It’s a rather long list. Intrusion, interruption, exaggeration, and so on and so forth. And I really made a list that’s a little separate from that.

Here are some of the criticisms. Marketers get consumers to want and spend more than they can afford. And we know that from the financial disaster people were buying homes with maybe nothing down. Marketers are skilled at creating grand differentiation where it shouldn’t exist. Like with commodities, you know, a chicken is a chicken, cement is cement. So they spend a lot of time trying to tell you their cement is really better, their salt is really better, and so on. Marketers want to produce and sell more goods without considering the resource and environmental costs of producing the goods.

The planet Earth is affected by the amount of production and the care with which it’s done. Marketers had not paid sufficient attention to product safety. We know that because Ralph Nader made his career, basically, car– the unsafety in cars, and then we got lead poisoning, we got asbestos problems, and so on. Here’s a serious criticism. Marketers– and this is not all marketers– these are some particular companies, and so on. Marketers favor giving the public what it wants, whether its good or not for them. Sure, I’ll sell you cigarettes. I’ll sell you anything that will make money.

Therefore marketing promotes a materialistic mindset, that– we get turned on to more of a materialistic world, a world of ever-changing products and services and keeping up with the Jones and some of that. Marketers rarely talk about sane consumption. Yeah, some beer companies say, “Please enjoy our beer, but don’t drink too much.” That’s nice that they– No one listens to that, and you still have binge-drinking, but they’re trying to do what they can and so on and so forth. Now, let me just say there’s another side. This is important too because it’s not a simple picture.

Marketing and standard of living

The other side of it is Marketing has undoubtedly raised the standard of living in the United States. People don’t naturally buy new things. In other words, do you know, people used to keep their refrigerators, which weren’t refrigerators at the time, they were ice boxes and they would keep going out and getting some ice and putting it in the box, and so on. And even the washing machines were very slow to take– In other words, people– It would be very expensive to buy a new appliance, but marketers persisted in saying your life will be better with new appliances, and that’s one of its jobs. I would even go so far as to say that marketing is so connected to the idea of the middle class.

We’re talking about preserving and building the middle class, and the lifestyle that goes with it, and marketing is an essential definer of what it is to be–and want– what it is to want, as a member of the middle class. Marketing in the form of social marketing has helped improve a lot of things. You know, one of the first causes that marketing turned to was the environment and waste and the ill-effects of some products, and so on. Preserving the environment was one of the first things that social marketers got into. Now they’re into obesity as a problem, littering as a problem, and other problems. Marketing is very important to the cultural world. Museums, performing arts, and one of the big problems that cultural institutions are facing, especially in the performing arts, is the aging of audiences.

How do you get people who are in their forties to go to opera, to go to the ballet, and so on. It’s called the greying of the audiences, and maybe that problem has been with us for a long time, but marketers are at work doing segmentation, targeting, positioning, in order to make sure that all seats are filled in the theatre, and also the museums are very busy, as marketing institutions, because they have to get visitors, they have to get donors, they have to get government grants, so marketing is almost an intrinsic function today that’s going on. But let me– This is not time to take a vote.

Do you like marketing or you don’t like marketing. But let me show you that the feeling– the negative feelings about marketing came up from these people. The attackers. They attacked marketing. Do you recognize anyone? You see Ralph Nader? I don’t… There he is. Yeah. Who else? Well, it is Ralph Nader. “Unsafe at Any Speed.” Rachel Carson, by the way, deserves so much more credit than we’ve given to her for her book on the Silent Spring, which was about the chemical pollution, the pesticides that were getting into our spring water, and so on.

Vance Packard and hidden persuaders

Vance Packard, who popularized the idea that we are hidden persuaders. That when you go into a movie theater, you don’t know this but an ad is sort of flashing to go and get some popcorn before you sit down. Subliminal advertising, which never did happen, but the hidden persuaders.

And then John Kenneth Galbraith, who pointed out that while we spend so much money in making enough deodorants for any type of interest you have in deodorants, in the public sector– In the public sector, you’ve got streets that are littered, and there’s some garbage, and there’s slow traffic, and– And so we have a good private sector, but we can’t enjoy it because the public sector doesn’t have the public good that would facilitate things.

Naomi Klein and branding

You’ve got Naomi Klein, who’s probably the prototype person now for attacking branding. Brands, brands, they’re awful. You’re paying more than you need to pay. The book is called “No Logo,” logo being another name for brand. And Michael Sandel is– has this new book out, which is really interesting and worth reading. He’s the fella who ran a course on justice, and would ask groups about this size at Harvard, “What is the just thing to do in each situation?” But his new book is called “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Marketing” where he points out that if you’re in jail in California and you don’t like the cell, you can pay for a better cell. You know, maybe one with a computer if you want a computer, and so on. But he’s also– he thinks today our culture divides people in social classes more clearly. We used to go to ball games; I would sit next to someone who was rich and someone who was poor. We’d all stand in the same line for hot dogs.

Today, the guys who are rich are up in the sky box, and he calls it the sky box-ification of the United States. The sky box-ification. They’re eating filet mignon and we peasants are down there having– standing in line for our hot dog. So we are not meeting each other as we used to, in the older days. It’s a very interesting treatment. I like to quote Will Rogers with this remark: “If advertisers spent the same amount of money that they– on improving the product as they do on advertising, they wouldn’t have to advertise it. And that’s– By the way, that’s a very profound observation, because in the age of the internet, it’s so much easier to talk about a product you like to others and also about a product you don’t like. And in a sense, if this goes far enough, there will be no bad companies anymore. It would be not possible for a company to be a bad company, because the word of mouth will sink it. So he’s sort of touching on that point.

Do a good job and others will advertise the good job you did. Now, I want to add another group, and this is a group of visionaries, and I’d like to call them our best marketers. But they’re not necessarily the chief marketing officer, they’re CEOs. Their contribution has been the kind you want from your chief marketing officers. So who do you see here? Do you know any of those people? Yeah. You’ve got to know some of them. But you probably don’t know the first one.

Swedish Ingvar Kamprad invented IKEA

Ingvar Kamprad. It’s very even hard to remember his name, but he’s that Swedish person who invented IKEA, who said, “I must bring down the cost of furniture, and I can do that by taking the air out of it and just selling knocked down furniture, and now people can afford to have some nice things in their home.

Richard Branson self-promotion and branding

Richard Branson is phenomenal. He’s a– not only in self-promotion. He’s one of the best self-promoters possible. I don’t know if you know that he was in Times Square some years ago to introduce his new cell phone, the Virgin cell phone, and he said he was going to drop off of a building, a 30-story building, and– not wearing any clothes or something, so everyone showed up. I don’t know why they would want to show up, but they showed up in Times Square, and sure, he did jump down, but it was on a rope and he’s carrying a huge version of his new cell phone. And so everyone–not just in Times Square–the reporters were covering it. All of New York knew about the new– there was a new Virgin cell phone. So he’s very good at that. But right now, he told me something I couldn’t believe. I was in Dubai, and he gave a speech, and we were just chatting, and he said, “Where are you from?” I said Chicago, and he says, “You know, there will be a time when you can go from Dubai to Chicago in half an hour.”

What is it. Is this a time machine you’re inventing? He says, “No, it’s just a rocket ship.” So the rocket ship takes off from Dubai, it just goes right up in the air and lands in Chicago. So he’s working with some people on the new spaceships, basically. And you want to watch him. Of course, Walt Disney. Great, great visionary. Herb Kelleher. Thanks to him, we have Southwest Airlines, which started a whole class of low-cost airlines. And then we’ve got Anita Roddick, who ran The Body Shop, where she said “I’m not selling hope, I’m selling good skin lotion. All the others sell hope.” That was a famous remark by Revlon, “In the factory we make lipstick, in the store we sell hope.” But she wrestled with that one.

Famous marketers – Gates, Jobs, Bezos

Then you’ve got Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos. And Jeff– Let’s see, we’ve gotta make sure he gets in there. Jeff is extraordinary. If there’s anyone who has consumer thinking in his mind, wanting to facilitate the consumer to really order or re-order or return or anything like that. And then to buy more than books, to buy electronics, to buy clothes. He’s done a marvelous job. He’s very exemplary in that sense. We’re running out of time and I’m going to want some questions from you, but let me just refer to a few more things.

This is a chart I use in the book, “Marketing 3.0,” basically to say that every company should define its mission, it’s vision for the future, and its values– what it really cares about, and if you’re a 1.0 marketer, it’s a good job you’re doing. I mean, of course you’re trying to deliver satisfaction, make a profit, and make a good product. Be better. If you’re a 2.0 marketer, you want to help people realize their aspirations. You want to deliver things that they might aspire to have. They will return frequently to buy more, and your product is different than the others. Not only better, but different. And suddenly, you move from mind to heart to spirit. What’s spirit? It’s that small set of companies that say “We’re compassionate. We have compassion for the state of the world. We want to get involved. We want the companies to be a machine for improving the lives of people.” You could say– you could reduce that to just some charity work they’re doing.

Or it could be a real, fundamental strain in the way they do their business. We can name some companies that really have felt that they want to help reshape the world into being a better world. So that is– Here’s one of my favorite companies that illustrate the cells in that picture. The SC Johnson company in Racine, Wisconsin whose products are shown over here. You probably have purchased some of their waxes or some of their insect repellent or other things, but they’re just winning awards for being a very caring company. Incidentally, a book that you might want to read is called “Firms of Endearment,” which is a fancy way to say companies we love. Firms of Endearment. And I love the subtitle, “How World-Class Companies Profit from Passion and Purpose.”

Famous marketing brands – Apple, Amazon, Costco, Nike

And it’s based on asking audiences– random meeting of people–is there any company that you like? That you like a lot? Now, let me ask that question. Name a company that you would dearly miss if it disappeared, vanished. Apple! See, always Apple. I thought you were going to say Harley Davidson, but that’s another one. Amazon. I would miss Amazon. I really would. I would even subsidize it to continue. Which one? Costco. Of course. I’m with you on Costco. Nike. Okay, well you see what happens is, these are the names of the companies that came up again and again. I don’t think there’s any surprises there. I’ve asked other countries to do this too. Because it would be a different mix of companies that would come up. But the main thing is, these firms of endearment are so much more profitable than the ones that have not been dear to us.

They’re either 9 or 10 times as profitable, but let’s see why, and without going through everything here, look at the last one. These are the attributes of that set of companies. And the last attribute is that they spend less on marketing than rather more. I bet you thought that the companies that were going to be dear to us are the ones who are just advertising all the time. They’re so familiar. We see Coca-Cola all the time. All the time. No! They spend less on advertising, so who’s doing the advertising? The customer. You guys are. So that’s where you should put your money. Create a love affair. Create fans with others.

“The End of Work” This is Jeremy Rifkin’s book

Now I’m going to end with two slides. This is on a downer, a little bit. “The End of Work” This is Jeremy Rifkin’s book. It’s now about 9 or 10 years old. And he says because of the slow down in population growth, automation of factories and computers, robotics, 3D printing, can the nation create enough jobs? Can the world create enough jobs for the population, and so on. And it raises a question about marketing’s role. Marketing’s role normally is seen as to sell you some things. The basic role of marketing is to create jobs. It is the job creator. Namely, it gets you to want something that someone has to produce.

Does marketing really create new jobs or does it only create shifts in the shares?

So there’s a basic question: Does marketing really create new jobs or does it only create shifts in the shares? Like if I switch from brand X to brand Y, that’s not creating– Brand X loses a job and brand Y gets a job. So, but it is true that if we’re talking a new product, marketing will help accelerate it’s recognition, the awareness of it, and intensify the drive to purchase it. In other words, we buy our iPads and other things that come along partly because they’re wanted, they are desired objects, and marketing accelerates the rate at which growth takes place with those new products.

“The Death of Demand” and “Market Your Way to Grow: 8 Ways to Win” books

The other book, and I’ll end with this, is another downer. “The Death of Demand” And what is the relationship between marketing and demand? And is– he uses a term saturated– finding growth in a saturated global economy. I’ve been wrestling with that problem, and growth is the issue today. Growth is the issue. Growth means jobs, and so on. And the fact is, there are 8 ways to grow a business. So the title of the book is “Market Your Way to Grow: 8 Ways to Win.” And you know all of them. You know that we can go to places where there is growth. We can sell in China, even if it’s a low growth here. Or Brazil. We know we can grow by acquiring other firms. We know we can grow by innovating. Inventing something new. We know we can grow by taking business away from someone else, and so on and so forth. So one of the things we’re wrestling with is how do you, as a firm, grow?

And by coincidence, another colleague of mine at the Kelogg School of Management, just wrote a book called “Defending Your Business,” and it’s so nice that his book came out with mine, because the first job is always to defend what you’ve got. Hold on to the customers you have, then you start worrying about some more growth. So we both, as members of the department, are wrestling with how to ignore these books and say they’re wrong, and that there is a bright future ahead.