Professor Philip Kotler, renowned marketing scholar and one of many Kellogg experts in that field Photo © Nathan Mandell

To build a brand

Marketing was an early Kellogg strength, as scholars defined the principles of an emerging field. Today, the school keeps pushing the discipline's edge

By Matt Golosinski

For all the Kellogg School's excellence across a range of disciplines, marketing is still the one that many people associate with the school's global reputation.

It's easy to understand why: Kellogg is a marketing powerhouse, having essentially created the field a century ago. Thought leaders like Philip Kotler, the SC Johnson & Son Professor of International Marketing, then reinvented the discipline in the 1960s, sparking a revolution whose effects are still felt today. With dozens of hugely influential books — notably Marketing Management, first published in 1967 and now in its 13th edition — Kotler, like Kellogg, has become synonymous with marketing.

More than 40 years ago, Kotler drew on his economics training to bring an analytical rigor to a subject that often was descriptive. Further, he postulated that customers, not just marketing executives, should drive product development — an idea that ran counter to the "make-and-sell" notion that relegated consumer needs to a secondary concern.

But Kotler, with colleague Sidney Levy, a pioneering qualitative researcher and brand expert, also pushed marketing's boundaries another way. Their 1969 article, "Broadening the Concept of Marketing," struck a blow to conventional thinking, demonstrating that marketing was "a pervasive societal activity that goes considerably beyond the selling of toothpaste, soap and steel." In fact, they contended, nonbusiness organizations of all kinds used marketing.

Earlier Kellogg faculty laid the ground for these breakthroughs. When Northwestern's School of Commerce opened in 1908, professors, including psychologist Walter Dill Scott, established marketing's fundamentals. Scott's research produced several influential texts, including The Theory of Advertising in 1903 — the first such book in its field. Later, his Psychology of Advertising in Theory and Practice, laid out principles rooted in empirical science. In 1909 Scott delivered what can be considered the school's first marketing course, Psychology of Business, Advertising and Salesmanship.

Other faculty, including Fred Clark and Paul Ivey, advanced marketing during a time (1920-1930) when its literature was growing. Over the decades, many Kellogg scholars made contributions to marketing's development. Among these were Delbert Duncan who came to Northwestern in 1930 and, along with Ira Anderson, founded the Retail Service Scholarship Program, which placed graduate interns with prominent Chicago stores. The program's success was measured by the quality of its students, who included future School of Commerce marketing scholars Ralph Westfall and Harper Boyd. Duncan also produced influential textbooks, including Marketing: Principles and Methods. Anderson, meanwhile, published Principles of Retailing. Lyndon Brown made contributions to marketing research, while his peers Lloyd Herrold and James Hawkinson did the same for advertising and sales management, respectively.

By mid-century, the school claimed Richard Clewett's expertise in distribution channels — an area whose importance another Kellogg colleague, Louis Stern, would amplify and articulate brilliantly as a behavioral and interorganizational relationship starting in the early 1970s (Stern's Marketing Channels, co-authored with Kellogg professor Anne Coughlan, is in its 7th edition). Then too Steuart Henderson Britt distinguished himself as a leader in studying consumer behavior, also serving for years as editor of the Journal of Marketing.

More recently, Coughlan, Bobby Calder, Brian Sternthal, Alice Tybout, Lakshman Krishnamurthi, Dipak C. Jain, Andris Zoltners, Greg Carpenter, James Anderson, and Angela Lee, among others, have contributed their knowledge to the Marketing Department, which continues its pioneering interdisciplinary approach. Kellogg professors have earned prestigious awards for their research in quantitative and behavioral areas like marketing strategy, metacognition, consumer judgment, branding, forecasting models, sales force management, and new-product diffusion, and they have held senior roles with professional organizations and academic journals.

No surprise, then, that the Kellogg marketing curriculum has earned top marks in international rankings for nearly two decades, producing leading texts in marketing management, distribution channels and sales promotions.

As Dean Jain says, "A century on, Kellogg marketing expertise continues to flower."

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