The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Make a customer, not a sale, says guru Kotler

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jul 18, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Make a customer, not a sale, says guru Kotler

Staff Reporter

Creating superior value for customers `is the key'

Philip Kotler, management expert. — PHOTO: K. V. Srinivasan

CHENNAI: Creating superior value for customers should be the defining principle of any business strategy, global or local, management guru Philip Kotler has said.

Mr. Kotler, who was speaking after addressing Cognizant's global leadership programme on Monday, said success meant making a customer rather than registering a sale. Companies need to be creating, communicating and delivering value, or what he termed CCDV advocacy.

"A product may keep changing but companies would want to share with their clientele a relationship that goes on and on," said Mr. Kotler, who is professor of international marketing at the Northwestern University Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Chicago. Given a choice between a customer-centred company and a product-focussed one, he would back the former to succeed.

On the latest management trends, Mr. Kotler said companies had begun to measure the payback from marketing spend ranging from event sponsorship to celebrity endorsement. For instance, a company would scrutinise the success of positioning, say Tiger Woods, as its brand ambassador when a host of similarly visible personalities are available at a third of the cost, he pointed out.

The future is in the Far East, according to Mr. Kotler. India should leverage its core strengths in IT, back-office jobs, garments and value addition in agriculture like food processing, he felt.

Cognizant's global leadership programme, Hi5, focuses on building the IT firm's future leaders through training programmes and exposure to the foremost management thinkers.

Bala V. Balachandran, founder, Great Lakes Institute of Management and Cognizant's Lakshmi Narayanan, CEO, and Stephanie Kelly, vice president, North American Human Resources, participated.

Later in the day, Mr. Kotler released the 12th edition on his popular management book Marketing Management, co-authored with Kevin Lane Keller. The revised edition published as Marketing Management - A South Asian perspective has inputs by two Indian Institute of Management professors, Abraham Koshy and Mithileshwar Jha. The Indian authors have illustrated local case studies for the marketing principles explained by Mr. Kotler and Mr. Keller.

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