Marketing guru thinks Hall of Fame

Part-time Longboat Key resident Philip Kotler, considered one of the leaders of modern marketing, can add another title to his mantel.

Now Kotler is in the Thinkers50 Hall of Fame, a London-based global organization that ranks the top 50 management thinkers every two years. Thinkers50 was launched in 2001, and its lists, with names such as “Good to Great” author Jim Collins and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, have been called the “Oscars of management gurus.”

This year marks the debut of its Hall of Fame, according to a press release. The Hall of Fame, says the organization, consists of “distinguished thinkers who have all made a lasting and vital impact on how organizations are led and managed.”

Kotler, according to Thinkers 50, has “pushed the frontiers of where marketing can make a difference.” An international marketing professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, Kotler says he began to consider marketing at the University of Chicago in the 1960s. His professors there: Nobel Prize winners Milton Friedman and Paul Samuelson.

“I concluded that if those two great minds couldn't agree on economic issues, I probably wasn't going to make a difference in that field,” Kotler says in the Thinkers50 release. “At the same time, I was attracted to very tangible problems that economists don't deal with, such as: How much do you spend on advertising? What's a sensibly sized sales force? How do you really set prices intelligently? I got into the mindset of a market.”