A History of Marketing

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Welcome to episode two of A History of Marketing. I'm Andrew Mitrak, and today my guest is Guy Kawasaki. Guy shaped the field of marketing by popularizing the idea of evangelism marketing. Today, there are more than 10,000 technology, brand, and product evangelists on LinkedIn, and that wouldn't have happened without Guy.

Guy worked at Apple during some of their most iconic marketing moments, so he shares an insider's perspective on the launch of the Macintosh, the 1984 Super Bowl ad, and the "Think Different" campaign. Guy is also a teacher; he's written many books about marketing and entrepreneurship, and I talk in the episode about how his books influenced me personally as a marketer. If you like this conversation, definitely check out Guy's Remarkable People podcast, where he interviews the likes of Steve Wozniak, Arianna Huffington, Seth Godin, and hundreds of others. Now, here it is: my conversation with Guy Kawasaki.

Read the full transcript:Note: This text is from a recorded conversation transcribed with AI. I have read it to check for mistakes, but it is possible that there are errors that I missed. I’ve also added images and helpful links in the transcript.

Andrew Mitrak: Guy Kawasaki, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Guy Kawasaki: Yeah, thank you. I think that's a great name for a podcast, A History of Marketing. You've got a lot of material to cover there, Andrew.

Andrew Mitrak: There's a whole lot of history. I don't know if we'll get to every single campaign and every brand, but we'll try. I want to start by saying what an honor it is to speak with you. When I was a marketer for startups, your book The Art of the Start 2.0—it was the 2.0 version—was one of those books that I just referenced over and over.

Guy Kawasaki: Wow.

Andrew Mitrak: And I feel like I'm speaking to my teacher, so it's amazing.

Guy Kawasaki: Well, I hope you, as a student, got value out of the book.

From Law School Dropout to MBA

Andrew Mitrak: Got a lot of value out of it. So, I want to start this conversation way back before you even started your career. In your book Wise Guy, you write about the time you went to law school. And then you dropped out after a week and changed paths to get your MBA, and you majored in marketing.

Guy Kawasaki: Yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: What was it that drove you to an MBA in marketing?

Guy Kawasaki: I wanted to be an entrepreneur as opposed to a lawyer. This is back in the mid-70s. And back then, if you're Asian-American, your parents want you to be a doctor, dentist, or lawyer. So, I tried the doctor route, and I fainted in the hospital, so I knew doctor was out. And then I read some article about dentists having the highest rate of suicide, so dentistry was out. So, all that was left was lawyer. And my father was a legislator in the state of Hawaii; he had never gone to college. So, it was kind of his dream that his son would go to college, go to law school, and all that kind of stuff. And I hated law school. I hated it so much I quit after a week.

Andrew Mitrak: After you quit law school, what was it that drove you to pursue an MBA and focus on marketing, of all things?

Guy Kawasaki: The interesting thing is that back then, an MBA was some kind of dues that you paid. And if you wanted to get ahead in business, you had an MBA. And so, back then, in that 1970-1980 timeframe, we had to get an MBA to get good positions in business.

The Value of an MBA for Entrepreneurs

Guy Kawasaki: Now, of course, the interesting thing is, if someone were to ask me today, "Do I need to get an MBA to be an entrepreneur?" I would tell you absolutely not. That it is neither necessary nor sufficient. And what you should do is, if you're the geek, find the marketer; if you're the marketer, find the geek, and get rolling. You shouldn't go get an MBA.

Andrew Mitrak: Your LinkedIn profile says this: "Education: UCLA MBA." And your quote on it is, "I've come to believe that an MBA is a hindrance to entrepreneurship, but I do have one from UCLA.”

Guy Kawasaki: At least I'm honest.

Andrew Mitrak: Do you think that there was any value from your marketing courses, or were you taught things that were able to apply?

Guy Kawasaki: I can't exactly condemn the whole MBA program. It's not exactly the MBA's fault; you get out of a degree what you put into the degree. And the funniest thing is, I became very good friends with my marketing professor. To this day, we're friends. And yes, I learned the classical marketing things from Philip Kotler, like the five P's or the four P's or the three P's, or whatever those P's are. I got a bunch of P's: price, promotion, place, and—

Andrew Mitrak: Product.

Guy Kawasaki: Product! Product, price, place, promotion. So, I learned that, and I learned classical marketing lingo. So, when a consulting firm comes into your company and tries to BS you with marketing terms, it'd be nice to know the marketing terms they're trying to BS you with.

Learning Sales and Marketing in the Jewelry Business

Andrew Mitrak: A lot of people who get MBAs join those consulting firms, but you didn't do this. While you were in business school, you worked part-time at a jewelry company.

Guy Kawasaki: Yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: And to quote your book, "I started out by counting diamonds and left five years later as the vice president of sales and marketing." So, what does sales and marketing look like for a jewelry company in the 1970s?

Guy Kawasaki: The jewelry business is hand-to-hand combat. You have to learn how to sell. Now, when people hear in 2024 "learning to sell," you're thinking, "Oh, it's a Google A/B test," or "You're testing various forms of ChatGPT text." That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about hand-to-hand combat sales. In jewelry, it means you make an appointment with a fine jewelry retailer, you fly to Kansas City, the appointment is at 10:00, they finally come out and say hello to you at 11:00, then they keep you waiting another hour, and then they give you 15 minutes for you to show them your line. And in that 15 minutes, they're telling you your stuff is too expensive, and "We can get this anywhere cheaper," and blah blah blah. So, you learn patience, you learn rejection, you learn a lot of things that are very useful for the rest of your life.

Andrew Mitrak: Totally. So, it sounds like this job was a little more sales than marketing, is that fair?

Guy Kawasaki: Well, let me put it to you this way, Andrew: I believe that all of life is sales. People think sales is just this act of taking these orders down or having people click through and put something in a shopping basket and then use Apple Pay to pay. But I'm telling you, life is sales. You sell to get a date, you sell to get a job, you sell to get an upgrade to first class on United even though you got a coach fare, you're selling the front desk clerk to give you a corner room because you need more space to have meetings in the morning. You're selling the clerk to say, "Checkout is at 11:00, but I got a meeting at 12:00. Can I get a late checkout?" I hate to tell you, but life is sales.

How a Love of Cars Led to a Career at Apple

Andrew Mitrak: So, moving on past the jewelry company, you joined Apple in 1983, which seems like a really exciting time to join Apple. And it was Mike Boich, who was the first software evangelist, who hired you.

Guy Kawasaki: Yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: And you write in your book that Steve Jobs told Mike, "You can hire Guy, but you're betting your job on him." And so, do you know why Mike was willing to bet his job on you? What was it that got you this role?

Guy Kawasaki: Well, it was 100% pure, honestly, nepotism. We were very good friends at Stanford. I'm going to take you down a little bit of a rat hole. When I was a young kid in Hawaii, somebody gave me a ride in his Porsche 911. And when I rode in that 911, I said, "Oh my God, this is why you gotta study, Guy. This is why you gotta work hard because you don't want to buy a used Toyota Corona for the rest of your life. You want to drive a German or Italian car." And I fell in love with cars, and I was obsessed with cars.

Then I get to Stanford, and I meet this guy named Mike Boich. He too was obsessed with cars. The difference between me and him is that I wanted to have cars, and he was from a wealthy family; he had nice cars.

He had a Ford GT40, which is probably worth $5 million today, although he doesn't have it because he made one of the worst deals in the history of automotive trades. He traded a Ford GT40 for a 1976 911 Turbo. That 911 Turbo might be worth, I don't know, $150,000 today, but it would be much better to have the Ford GT40.

So, anyway, we get to Stanford, somehow we meet, and we forge this friendship over cars, not over computer science, not over Apple I, not over programming BASIC or FORTRAN, anything like that. Our friendship was based on a love of cars. And then we graduated, and he went to Hewlett-Packard, and from Hewlett-Packard, he got a promotion and went to Apple's Mac division. And then he called me up, and he said, "We need somebody to be an evangelist." And I'm telling you, 90% of my qualifications was that I was his friend.

The Origins of the Term "Software Evangelism"

Andrew Mitrak: So, he calls you up and says, "We want an evangelist." And evangelist was kind of a new word; it was unique to Apple. I think you write that Mike Murray, the director of marketing for Macintosh, he's the one who coined this term "software evangelism."

Guy Kawasaki: Well, there was Jesus before Mike Murray.

Andrew Mitrak: Right. But that's exactly right. That evangelism is this term that's really associated, up to that point, with religion. And what was your reaction to, "Is my job title going to be 'evangelist'?" Was there any explaining you had to do when your business card said "evangelist"?

Guy Kawasaki: There were people who looked askance at that concept. Particularly if you were a hardcore Christian, you're thinking, "What are these punks from Silicon Valley? They're appropriating our word. Jesus and John, and now Mike and Guy—not quite the same category there, bro." So yeah, there was some of that. There was some pushback in the sense of, "What the hell does an evangelist do? They're the guys who tell me to come down during the Sunday service and give witness to Christ. Is that what you're asking me to do?" Well, in a sense, we were asking them to come down and embrace Macintosh, but that's not exactly evangelism in their minds. And I want people listening to this to understand that evangelism comes from a Greek word meaning "bringing the good news." And so, what I did was I brought the good news. I brought the good news that Macintosh would make you more creative and more productive because of its graphical user interface and its WYSIWYG printing. I brought the good news to developers that this is a product that—you're no longer just dependent on the IBM PC. We have much, much richer ROMs, so you can program the software you always dreamed of creating. And this easy-to-use, fun, cool computer will open up a market to people who would have never bought a computer. So, that was the Macintosh religion. And so, my job was to bring the good news of Macintosh evangelism to developers so that they would create Macintosh products.

Guy Kawasaki: ‘The Father of Evangelism Marketing’

Andrew Mitrak: Now, you weren't the first evangelist, and you didn't come up with evangelism, but if you think of who in the world is most associated with evangelism for a product or for technology, or in the secular sense, it'd be Guy Kawasaki.

Guy Kawasaki: I think that's a good thing.

Andrew Mitrak: I think it's a good thing. I looked around, and sometimes you've been referred to as the "father of evangelism marketing," and—

Guy Kawasaki: Well, to be quite honest, Mike Boich was the first evangelist, the first secular tech evangelist. I was the second one, but I get all the credit.

Andrew Mitrak: I think we'll go on to later, as we get further forward in your career, you did evangelize this concept of evangelism. And so, what did the daily work of an evangelist look like at that time?

Guy Kawasaki: The big picture is we bring the good news. So, the concept is, how do you bring the good news? And what we did is basically, we did a lot of demos. We showed people MacWrite and MacPaint. And basically, if you saw MacPaint or MacWrite in the mid-80s, having used the Apple II's DOS and character operating system, or the IBM PC's MS-DOS operating system, and you saw MacPaint and MacWrite in the Macintosh Finder, it was a religious experience. And so, we would show them the good news and ask them to believe in Macintosh as much as we did.

Secrecy and the Macintosh Launch

Andrew Mitrak: You joined in '83 as an evangelist for the Macintosh, and the Macintosh hadn't launched yet, right? So, did you have to have people sign NDAs or carry it in a secret suitcase, or what was that like?

Guy Kawasaki: Yeah, to get a Macintosh demo, you had to sign an NDA. And if you wanted to get a Macintosh prototype, you had to give us your firstborn child. But yeah, there was a lot of secrecy. And, I actually think that the secrecy added to the mystery and the romance of this computer. I'm not telling you we were paranoid in doing this because we were such sly marketers, we said, "We don't care if everybody knows about it, but let's make it really hard to find out just for marketing purposes." No, we really wanted it to be a secret and make a big splash on January 24th, 1984.

Inside Apple's Iconic 1984 Super Bowl Ad

Andrew Mitrak: I think I know what you're referring to. This is like a natural segue to what's often referred to as the best advertisement of all time: Apple's 1984 ad that aired at the Super Bowl. When did you first see the ad? What was your initial reaction to it?

Guy Kawasaki: I saw it on January 24th, 1984, on TV. There was a very small group of people who had seen that ad. It was Mike Murray because he was in charge of marketing, Steve Jobs obviously, probably Steve Jobs' direct reports. But, I don't want to give you the impression that I was BFFs with Steve Jobs. I was, like—let's see, I was—it was Steve Jobs to Mike Murray to Mike Boich to Guy.

Andrew Mitrak: What was the reaction among other Apple employees or other folks in the sales and marketing team when they saw this ad for the first time?

Guy Kawasaki: That's a mixed bag because, at that time, the Apple II was the shipping computer. The Apple II was 100% of the revenue, right? And yet, there was this small collection in the Macintosh division who thought that our product was so much better, even though your product is paying for our product, and your product is paying for our salaries, and your product is paying for our building and everything. But we were the handpicked, spoiled brats of Steve Jobs. So, there was some resentment, honestly, and I can't say I blamed them. And then, in a sense, there was always a battle for developers, right? So, for developers making Apple II software, and then Guy and Mike Boich show up and say, "We want you to do Macintosh software." Well, guess what? The Apple II people weren't exactly thrilled that we were trying to convince people to do Macintosh software. But eventually, Macintosh, honestly, killed the Apple II. But it was walking a tightrope there because you don't want to kill the Apple II, you don't want to kill the cash cow before the calf is born, to use a totally farming metaphor.

Andrew Mitrak: Did this ad make your job easier? Did people want to buy and develop for the Macintosh because of this ad, or what did it do?

Guy Kawasaki: It made it much easier because people were so intrigued by, "What could this Macintosh be? And it's so revolutionary, and it's so different, and it's so mysterious, and it's so cool, and it had this great ad." That nobody had ever seen an ad like that before. And that ad, which was almost killed by the board of directors, but that ad was a tremendous marketing tool. Tremendous.

Evangelizing Evangelism: Guy’s Books and Influence

Andrew Mitrak: So, from 1983 to 1987, you were on the evangelist team for the Mac, and then you left Apple in 1987. You write books like The Macintosh Way and Selling the Dream, and this is when you kind of became something of an evangelist for the concept of evangelism. You start writing publicly about evangelism. What drew you to do this, first off? And then also, did you see other companies start to also hire evangelists around this time?

Guy Kawasaki: I will say that the creation of the secular evangelist career didn't take off that fast because there are not a lot of companies like Apple. And it's not so important semantically that you use the word "evangelist." What's important is the concept that you are marketing something that is good news, and the good news is not for your benefit; it's for the benefit of the customer, right? So, the difference between evangelism and most sales is that most sales is about the salesperson. "This is my quota, this is my bonus, this is my salary, please buy my widget so I can make my bonus." With Macintosh—and I tell you, this is—I absolutely, 100% promise you this was true—that when we were evangelizing Macintosh, we believed in our heads, "Yes, it's good for us as Apple employees, but it's also very good for you because you will become more creative and productive." So, it's not just about me making my quota; it's about you improving your life.

Returning to Apple as Chief Evangelist

Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. Now, you returned to Apple in the mid-90s, this time as Chief Evangelist.

Guy Kawasaki: Yes.

Andrew Mitrak: How had evangelism at Apple evolved between the time you left and when you returned?

Guy Kawasaki: Well, I left in '87, and I returned in '95. And those were a few difficult years. John Sculley was fired, Steve Jobs was fired, layoffs, everybody thought Apple was gonna die. So really, I was brought back to maintain the Macintosh cult and maintain the macOS developer community, as a chief evangelist, chief cheerleader, all that kind of good stuff. It was a glorious time. It was the most satisfying work to—it sounds immodest, but I kind of helped Apple survive that period.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it was really in a bad spot. This is the time where, I think it was—what was—Michael Dell saying they should just sell the company and return it to shareholders?

Which is probably the worst call of all time, maybe. But anyway, it turns around at this time. And it does seem like, in that late '90s, mid-late '90s period, and when you returned, Apple does really turn around.

Guy Kawasaki: Well, I could actually make the case, if you really knew, whenever I left, Apple turned around. Because I left in '97, and then it started really doing well. And I am no Steve Jobs, I am no Steve Wozniak, I'm no Tim Cook. Don't give me too much credit.

Behind the Scenes of Apple's "Think Different" Campaign

Andrew Mitrak: One of the things during this turnaround is another top Apple campaign: the "Think Different" campaign. And you were in the room when Lee Clow from Chiat\Day presented this campaign for the first time. Can you describe what this presentation was like?

Guy Kawasaki: Yeah, so this is just as Steve is about to return, having been purged from Apple. So, he was coming back after the purge. And back then, it was kind of really almost a negative to use a Macintosh because this is a tarnished company, and it was going to die, and blah blah blah. Although the Macintosh believers never really bought into that, I'll tell you that. The faithful were faithful all through that. And so, we couldn't exactly make a credible case that, "This is the safe purchase," that "This is mainstream," that "This is conservative," and "This is logical," and all that. So, the people at Chiat, they came up with this genius ad campaign about, "If you want to be like Pablo Picasso or Richard Branson or Jim Henson or Amelia Earhart or Gandhi." So, basically, the campaign was, "These are the kinds of people who think different, and if you want to think different and be remarkable like them, you would use a Macintosh." And that ad, that whole sentiment, just so fit in with the mentality of the Macintosh employee, Macintosh believer.

Andrew Mitrak: So the words "Think Different," I recalled in Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography, and he wrote, quote, "They debated the grammatical issue. If 'different' was supposed to modify the verb 'think,' it should be an adverb, as in 'think differently.' But Jobs insisted 1 he wanted it to be 'different.'" I'm like, "Oh my gosh, how could they have ever considered 'think differently?'" Were you present for this debate at all, and do you recall this happening?

Guy Kawasaki: Nope, nope, nope. I was just a little peon. No, I cannot take any credit for that. I was just in the room, and it was unveiled. So, no, that was the genius of Lee Clow and the team at Chiat\Day. I had nothing to do with it. And anyway, I'm very glad they didn't use the adverb.

Andrew Mitrak: I don't think we'd be talking about it today if it was "Think Differently."

Standing up to Steve Jobs

Andrew Mitrak: So, would you be open to sharing the story of what happened after this presentation?

Guy Kawasaki: Of course. So, Lee Clow gives this presentation of "Think Different" to the marketing department. There had to be, I don't know, 15, 20 marketing people there. At the end, Lee Clow says, "I have two copies of the videotape, Steve, of all the ads. I'm going to give you one copy and one copy to Guy." And Steve says, "Don't give it to Guy." So, I said to Steve, "What's the matter, Steve? Don't you trust me?" And Steve, as only Steve would, he says, "Yes, Guy, I do not trust you." And this is one of those moments in your life where, if you look back and say, "Why was I such a wimp? Why did I just back down and say, 'Oh, it's okay, Steve. Yeah, you're Steve Jobs. I'm just a little pimple on the face of this earth.'" So, that was a man or mouse moment. And so, when he said that, I said, "It's okay, Steve, I don't trust you either." And it probably cost me $250 million, but it was worth it.

Andrew Mitrak: For me, the story, it really strikes a nerve. I think we've all been in some situation where somebody who's higher up, they're being somewhat of a bully or just flexing their power or diminishing their team or something.

Guy Kawasaki: Me—well, but the funny thing is, a few years later, Steve offered me another job, but like a jack**s, I turned that down.

Guy Kawasaki on Evangelizing Canva

Andrew Mitrak: Moving on to one that seems to be a very good call to work with is Canva. You're now the chief evangelist at Canva. They make a great product; I use it for this podcast. What does your role as an evangelist look like today?

Guy Kawasaki: Well, it's just like before. I'm telling the good news of Canva. So, what Canva does is it empowers people to be better communicators because it empowers you to create your own graphics. And that wasn't something people could do before. If you've ever tried Illustrator or Photoshop, you know that you don't just whip those things out and start creating great graphics. So, Canva democratized design just like Macintosh democratized computers. So, I like to democratize things.

Andrew Mitrak: Being an evangelist in this day and age, there's social media today; there wasn't back in the '80s. Canva is a software product that's online, and the Macintosh was before the internet as we know it today, and it was a hardware product. Is your role as an evangelist strikingly different with Canva now versus Mac back then?

Guy Kawasaki: Well, obviously, in evangelizing Canva, you had more technology than a fax machine and a cell phone in the trunk of your car. So, that helps. There's all these online services, these social media platforms. There's where to send graphics. In fact, the ability for people to send graphics is kind of like the inflection point that made Canva so useful, right? If there was no need to send graphics with Twitter, well, guess what? People wouldn't be making graphics, and if they wouldn't be making graphics, they didn't need Canva. So, it all kind of worked out. And yes, Canva is online, software as a service, and Macintosh is plastic and silicon and glass and steel. But I think it's more similar than different, that it's good news. Good news is good news.

The Impact of Social Media on Evangelism

Andrew Mitrak: Outside of evangelism—I could probably spend hours asking you questions about social media—how has social media impacted evangelism?

Guy Kawasaki: Well, social media has impacted evangelism because it gives you a way to spread the good news better than anything ever before. I don't know how much it cost to make the 1984 commercial—land, let's say it's a million. Let's say the spot was 5 million. So, 6 million to run a 1984 commercial. You can buy a lot of ads on social media for $6 million, especially $6 million in 1984, what it would be today. So, the technology has made spreading the good news much easier. Of course, the technology has also made spreading bad news and the incorrect news and the conspiracy news easier, too.

Andrew Mitrak: So there's more noise.

Guy Kawasaki: That's right. I bet if anybody spent $6 million on a social media ad today, though, we wouldn't be talking about it 40 years from now in 2065, the way we're talking about the Apple 1984 ad, though. So, there's something about that.

Guy Kawasaki's Unique Method for Collecting Quotes

Andrew Mitrak: As we start to wrap up, one kind of random question for you, or a fun one, is that in all of the books of yours that I read, you start each chapter with a quote. And I was writing down these quotes because they're all so great. And you seem to collect and find the perfect quote for the perfect chapter. How do you go about collecting and keeping track of your favorite quotes?

Guy Kawasaki: Yeah, I don't know where I started that practice. I must have read somebody else's book who did that, and I thought, this is like—I would say, when you have that at the start of a chapter, it's kind of like when you have a banana split, and the first thing you eat is the cherry, right? So, that's the cherry on top. And so, in the old days, when I had to find these quotes, I had all these—I had literally, I don't know, a dozen books of quotes. It was—God—oh, Bartlett's, I think it was, like, Bartlett's Book of Quotations.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah.

Guy Kawasaki: So, there was Bartlett's and all that. So, literally, I would just go—it was just brute force. And then the next generation of Guy finding good quotes was Goodreads because Goodreads has these favorite Goodreads quotes where you can just put in the word "innovation," and it'll give you every quote about innovation. But now, in my latest book—because I just finished another book. It's called Wiser Guy. I did a book five years ago called Wise Guy, and now I just completed a book called Wiser Guy. God forbid, maybe someday I'll write Wisest Guy, but right now, we're gonna stick with Wiser Guy. And I gotta tell you, you just go to ChatGPT or any AI model, and you say, "Give me 20 quotes about innovation." And two seconds later, you have 20 quotes about innovation from Tom Peters or Steve Jobs or, God forbid, Bill Gates or Elon or whatever. You got these 20 quotes, and then you pick the one that you like. And then you ask Madison—Madison, please make sure that ChatGPT didn't hallucinate that Isaac Asimov said this. Make sure that Isaac Asimov really did say this about innovation because I don't want to make an ass of myself and put in my book an Isaac Asimov quote that ChatGPT hallucinated. So, now finding those quotes is very easy.

Well, it's very easy to get a bunch of quotes to pick from. I would say it's still somewhat of an art to figure out which one of those 20 you pick.

Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. I'm glad that fact-checking was part of the process there.

I copied down a lot of quotes, but one that I feel like a fitting place to part with, "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others." And that's from Pericles. And I just thought that one was—

Guy Kawasaki: Was that Wise Guy?

Andrew Mitrak: That was in Wise Guy. That was a very good one, yeah.

Guy Kawasaki: Yeah. Well, I hope Pericles really said that.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it was in Greek, I'm sure it was translated.

Guy Kawasaki: I've never had anybody send me a message that says, "You know what? You said Aristotle said that? It wasn't Aristotle; it was Karl Marx or something."

Guy Kawasaki's Advice for Aspiring Marketers

Andrew Mitrak: As we wrap up, you've had a long career in marketing. What are some words of wisdom that you would share with marketers who are listening to this podcast who want to become better marketers themselves?

Guy Kawasaki: I've had a wonderful life being an evangelist and a marketer. And so, this is advice from an old evangelist and marketer to, I hope, young evangelists and marketers.

The first thing you need to understand is that it is not about you; it is about them. So, if you think that you're going to use this sales technique or this marketing technique or this evangelism technique to get your quota and bonus, and it's all about you, you're going to fail. Well, actually, you might succeed, but you won't be an evangelist. So, you gotta be thinking—you gotta work backwards from the customer, not forward from what you want to do. That's number one.

Number two piece of advice is, you have got to learn how to demo your product because the demo is the most important part of evangelism. It's not the pitch, it's not the baloney text, even that ChatGPT generated. It's, how good can you demo your Macintosh or your Canva or your motorcycle or your electric car or your software service, whatever it is. You gotta do good demos. If you cannot do a good demo, you're gonna suck as an evangelist. So, get that through your thick skull.

And the third thing is that, as an evangelist, just remember, always think, "Good news, good news, good news. It's not about me; it's good news. What is the good news I'm bringing?" And that's about all I can tell you about evangelism.

Andrew Mitrak: Well, Guy, thanks so much for this conversation. It's been an absolute blast. I've really enjoyed it.

Guy Kawasaki: Thank you very much.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

Welcome to the first episode of A History of Marketing. This podcast is a quest to understand how marketing evolved and today, we kick off this quest with an absolute legend: Dr. Philip Kotler, also known as the 'father of modern marketing.'

When I originally had the idea for this podcast, Phil was the very first person I reached out to, and meeting him has already made this project worthwhile.

Phil Kotler has authored over 90 books, including Marketing Management, which was my textbook when I studied marketing in school. To prep for this interview I watched his lectures on YouTube and read his autobiography, My Adventures in Marketing which is a lot of fun.

Phil Kotler’s career has spanned over six decades and his work has fundamentally shaped how we understand and practice marketing, so we cover a lot of territory in our 30 minutes together. Now here it is, my conversation with Dr. Philip Kotler.

Read the full transcript: Note: This text is from a recorded conversation transcribed with AI. I have read it to check for mistakes, but it is possible that there are errors that I missed. I’ve also added images and helpful links in the transcript.

Andrew Mitrak: Dr. Kotler, thanks for joining us!

Philip Kotler: Oh, thank you for inviting me. I'm always excited to talk about the history of marketing and where it's going.

The Emergence of the Word "Marketing"

Andrew Mitrak: I want to start at the beginning of where the word "marketing" originated. In one of your lectures, you give a fascinating illustration. You mentioned that if you looked in a Webster's dictionary, you wouldn't find the word "marketing," but then if you picked up a dictionary in 1910, you would find the word "marketing" in it. So I'm just curious what happened around the turn of the century with the emergence of "marketing?"

Philip Kotler: I would guess it wasn't used so much, maybe in conversation but not in print. Some people might say, "Hey, you're going to sell it or market it," I don't know, but there was no textbook on marketing. The first ones came around 1910. Why were they written? Well, because economists really wrote these new books called "marketing." They felt that economists didn't discuss enough of the factors that influence the level of demand. The main factor economists would talk about influencing demand was price: raise the price, less demand; lower the price, more demand. Well, these guys started to say, "But what about the whole advertising world? Doesn't that affect purchase rates? What about salespeople who knock on doors and show you new things and get your purchase order?" And then distribution, the whole system is quite complicated. So we needed a book, said economists, most of them were economists, that described things that economic theory didn't discuss or had no theory about, or fuzzy theories about. What is advertising and sales, and is that of any importance to mention when you're talking about macroeconomics or microeconomics? So that's how the book came about.

Andrew Mitrak: Absolutely. So these economists, these are sort of pre-Keynesian era economists, pre-Austrian School, very early economics. And marketing sort of originated as an academic pursuit from economists. I'm curious about when professional marketers, when you see a marketing job title in a company, would that also occur at the same time or was that later?

Philip Kotler: Well, that was later too. Actually, marketing was not looked upon as an important function. They called it really "advertising." And there was a separate group that was running the sales force. The two big things were, somehow we've got to incorporate in our thinking at that time something to say about a whole industry called "advertising" and a whole industry called the "sales force." The early books described these two areas in familiar terms, in common sense terms, but without much research. In other words, you'd find in one of the early books on marketing, "Here are the five traits of a successful salesperson." Well, you couldn't argue against those, but there was no evidence, no empiricism applied to figuring out why did IBM have a superior sales force and someone else did, and so on. And the same with advertising, it was common sense ideas of what make ads work well, print ads of course, this was maybe before we got to radio ads and television ads.

Philip Kotler's Journey: From Economics to Marketing

Andrew Mitrak: We talk about marketing as a form of applied economics and marketing originating from economics, and you yourself got your Masters and your PhD both in economics. I'm wondering if you could talk about how you jumped from economics to marketing and, I guess more broadly, what that relationship between economics and marketing is.

Philip Kotler: Those are two good questions. My economics degree at the Master's level was from the University of Chicago. I was a student of Milton Friedman.

Andrew Mitrak: Wow.

Philip Kotler: Therefore, I was learning Friedman economics in the sense, which is free market, and not only free market economics, but where the government is the problem, not the economy. But then, nothing about marketing. Then I moved for my PhD to MIT, and Professor Samuelson, Paul Samuelson, is the leader and he's a Keynesian economist. He believes that the government plays an important role, especially in recessions and depressions, of learning how to pump in more money so consumers will have more to spend and businesses could pick up on that demand. Now, that meant, how will consumers use the money that they're going to get? I got interested in the marketing question of how consumers use their money and how companies try to get consumers to use the money to buy the things that the companies are making. So marketing strategy became very interesting to me. And when I was hired at Northwestern University, the dean there said, "Do you want to teach economics or do you want to teach marketing?" But he made a statement, he says, "You know, economics is a pretty settled field. It's hard to become Paul Samuelson or Milton Freedman again. Marketing is ready for development." He was right. I was tempted to and see, more curious about the everyday world of people buying goods and services and companies trying to sell those goods and services.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, that's actually probably some broader career advice of looking at what's the emerging category and the frontier versus what's been more saturated and played out. I'm curious, beyond academia, your first encounters with marketing just as a young person. Were there advertisements that you encountered that you felt were specifically memorable or campaigns, or just as a consumer, what were your interactions or observations about marketing at the time?

Philip Kotler: I was very interested in advertising campaigns and whether they were a good use of the money of the company to get more demand coming about. For example, I would watch the Coca-Cola campaign, and I would say to myself, "Something's strange because there's no information that's new in the campaign." Everyone knows what Coke is, many people love it. So what's its purpose? Why tell us nothing? Well, they, that's not really what happened. It was showing the consumers in a happy state. It was an emotional response that was being, not a cognitive response. But the aim of the campaign was going to be to get people to feel happier connected with drinking Coke. But I wasn't just interested in advertising. I became interested in the whole idea of how to manage the marketing function in the company. Because frankly, the marketing function did not, was not in on the inner circle of the company. There's always the head of finance, we call the Chief Financial Officer, and their chief and product managers and all that. Marketing was there to help after all the other decisions were made. I'll give you an illustration. Often, the company has developed an innovation without any marketing people being part of the development of the innovation. And then when it was ready and tested in some ways, they call on the marketing people, "It's your turn to advertise it." Marketing people say, "Well, why did you price it that high? What was, who's the target market exactly? And why didn't you add these features? How did you even know that this was the best offer you could make?" So I was impressed with the companies that failed to include market-oriented thinking and customer-oriented thinking in making new products.

Figures who Influenced Marketing: Peter Drucker, Dale Carnegie, Ralph Nader, Abraham Maslow

Andrew Mitrak: Who are some of the leaders that most influenced you or who are the most influential people in the field of marketing that preceded your expertise in marketing?

Philip Kotler: Peter Drucker was not only the father of management, but he had a great appreciation of marketing in his voluminous writings. He was the one who said, "The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary." Because if you knew a lot about a customer, you will know that whether that person is going to even care about what you make. And if you know he will or she will care about it a lot, you have a right away to make it available and expose to them that they would get excited and they'd stand in line to buy it. In other words, his idea was to come out with a product that makes people just join the line to buy it as soon as possible. And we've seen products like that. Peter Drucker, here were some of his statements, and he's writing about management, but he loved marketing too. One of his statements, "The business enterprise has two and only two basic functions: marketing and innovation." Marketing and innovation produce results, all the rest are costs. Now, that was a put out to the people in production, people in finance, and so on. But if so, a company that is not good at marketing and innovation will slow down and die eventually. He says, "The purpose of a company is to create customers, not to make products." You know, in the old days, we say, "That's a car company, they make cars," right? No, they make customers for cars.

Andrew Mitrak: Okay, just want to pause on that. That's such a flip where I feel like sometimes today, marketing is seen as a cost center or the a cost of doing business and this is so contrary to that. And this is coming from somebody who is really an expert in business management stating this. So it is, it is just surprising to hear that it's so contrarian to sometimes what's the perception of marketing today.

Philip Kotler: Yeah.

Andrew Mitrak: In one of your talks as well, I saw you describing characters who influenced marketing and you mentioned Dale Carnegie, of course, from How to Win Friends and Influence People, the famous book.

Philip Kotler: Of course, the idea of the book How to Win Friends and Influence People was a testament about the kind of behavior someone who's selling something should have toward the buyer. It wasn't a book about applying high pressure or hard selling. It was soft selling, soft, engaging. It was valuing the consumer and the purpose, and probing what actually is operating in his or her mind. So that was good work. There were other people. You know, we had attacks on marketing too. We had people who said, "Our cars are unsafe." General Motors is making unsafe cars.

Andrew Mitrak: Ralph Nader.

Philip Kotler: Then we had Hidden Persuaders, Vance Packard, saying that even when you're in a theater, you may have to get up and get the popcorn because the movies have behind them a little thing that is suggesting that you're having a hunger for some popcorn. Never proven, of course, but the Hidden Persuaders, right? So, you know, I always said marketers deserve criticism and need to figure out how to respond.

Andrew Mitrak: What did the curriculum for marketing look like as you were becoming a student and a, and then a professor of marketing?

Philip Kotler: We found out that as a faculty member of a very good marketing group at Northwestern University, we divided our skill set into those marketing teachers who were going to be very quantitative, use methods of cluster analysis, regression analysis, sophisticated things, and those who were behaviorally oriented. They were going to get deeply into motivations of consumers and benefit formulations.

Brand building became very much, some people thought that the point was reached where maybe the field should be called "branding" rather than "marketing." But I argued against that because while branding is the most important, one of the most important things about marketing, the work, marketing is more about what products should we be making, and who do we want to go after. The brand comes up as part answers, but it's not a full enough question. Marketing is a holistic area. Now, I had a lot of influence from a fellow named John Howard, who didn't have much public presence, but he wrote wonderful stuff. He really took, helped create a framework for thinking about marketing.

But of course, the main framework that came about was what Jerome McCarthy did, the 4 P's thing. A little story about that. McCarthy went to Northwestern University for his training and took the class of Dick Clewett, who was a very good marketer and Clewett always talked about the three P's and the 1 D. He said, "Marketing is about product, price, and place, and distribution."

What is, what was Jerome's, what was Jerome's contribution? Instead of using the word "distribution," he used the word "promotion" instead. And so, product, price, place, and promotion, those were the four P's. Now, that's called the "marketing mix." Do you realize that historically there was a man named Neil Borden at Harvard who, in the maybe '40s, had a marketing mix of 12 tools that marketers can use? Interest, the interest rate is a tool. If you lower interest, more people will buy homes and all that. Great. Well, things, and so the interesting thing is that we went to four P's. Clewett was the inspiration that gave it to our friend who did it. But the interesting thing is strategy, well absolutely. Actually, those tools are tactics. Strategy is above that. Marketing mix elements are the tactics of marketing, but they have to be informed by a strategy that has figured out a need that isn't being met.

Andrew Mitrak: I want to talk about Marketing Management, which is the most widely used textbook today for marketers. And in your autobiography, you mentioned that as you were writing this, you weren't happy with any of the existing marketing textbooks. And this was partially what inspired you to write the first edition of Marketing Management. I suppose what was missing from these marketing textbooks at the time, and what did you want to do differently?

Philip Kotler: I wanted to have more theory about how can consumers actually behave. What we had, simple theories of people having needs. In fact, we had that famous one where there's needs going all the way from just to exist, your hunger being satisfied. But what is that triangle called?

Andrew Mitrak: Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

Philip Kotler: Yeah, so that scheme was there, but the behavior of sciences were growing and getting more sophisticated. We began to know much more about how the consumer side. So, all right, I felt Marketing Management offers a more comprehensive theory of consumer behavior and a more comprehensive theory of company behavior, management behavior, than we had really seen. I did a lot of work about strategy, differentiating between tactical marketing and strategic marketing. I also thought that some of the sophisticated tools for measuring demand and forecasting demand that I learned in the one-year Harvard program have to get explained to the students through the professor's learning roughly more about market segmentation theory. And then I quoted something, I think I developed it myself, STP. That marketing is about segmentation, targeting, and positioning.

Andrew Mitrak: I didn't realize that segmentation, targeting, positioning was something that you coined or came up with and popularized in your books. It's something that I come back to over and over. Do you recall the stroke of insight that led you to come up with that?

Philip Kotler: Well, it has to do with segmentation, which I was not the inventor of, the idea of doing more segmentation. I'm trying to remember the professor who wrote the most interesting article on it. But once you get into knowing there's even mathematics for segmentation, for optimizing on segmentation, that you now have segments, but you can't sell to all the segments. So targeting, figuring out the ones for whom you have the best product, and then communicating that it's the best for them is called positioning. Now, if that doesn't lead to branding, I don't know what does. So STP is the tool set for getting to build a strong brand.

Andrew Mitrak: Just coming back to Marketing Management, which is now in its 16th edition, I'm just curious about how it was first received. What was the initial reception of it like?

Philip Kotler: Well, I was delighted with the response, and I figured out the answer to why it was successful. It was successful because the marketing group always felt inferior to the finance group in a company. Marketing was common sense, but finance was science, right? Along comes a book, my 1967 book, that says marketing also has science to it. In other words, my book gave prestige to marketing. It gave a vocabulary and a mental framework where marketers are saying that they can add a lot of value. There was a whole group that thought marketing should stay centered on commercial activities, and I and Sid Levy, my colleague, said, "No, marketing is much broader than that because, first of all, you have the nonprofit organizations, and they're marketing a cause."

Social Marketing: Applying Marketing to Social Causes

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, well this kind of leads into social marketing in a way. You mentioned your colleague, Sid Levy, and you published a 1969 article entitled "Broadening the Concept of Marketing," and then in '71, you published an article in which you coined the term "social marketing." What inspired you to look at broadening marketing, and what inspired you to help create social marketing as a field?

Philip Kotler: The broadening, I mentioned, is coming about because we found out that all organizations want to use some advertising, and they have a pricing problem, and so on. But as far as social marketing, it came about because of cigarettes. We were all upset about how many people smoke and want to stop smoking. Can marketing help them stop smoking or smoke less? Yes, what we could do is the four P's: make the product taste poor or find a cigarette that is at least less harmful since they still want to smoke, or make it harder to find where you can buy cigarettes. Don't put them right in the front of the retail situation, put it in the closet. And then the guy selling to you has to go into the closet and get your Marlboro package or something. And then raise the price of cigarettes, so it's harder to smoke five a day at that price. And then do a promotion that makes it look ugly to be a smoker, that you're, show how your health, you're coughing all the time now, and so on. So the four P's work beautifully on that. Today, they're not working for companies to sell more product, but they are there to use a set of tools to help people get off of something that they themselves don't want to be on.

Pushback Against Broadening the Concept of Marketing

Andrew Mitrak: Oh, wow. I want to come back to this idea of broadening the concept of marketing. From what I understand, there was maybe even some pushback of people saying, "Hey, we want marketing to be more of a narrow field focused on products and services," while clearly, marketing is much broader than that. I'm curious what the first reception to this idea was.

Philip Kotler: Well, I think people were hostile, but I would say that there was a group that wanted to stay with commercial business only. And we took a vote. We asked the AMA, American Marketing Association, to run a vote on this question of, "Do you, as a professor and member of the AMA, feel we should not stray from commercial marketing or that we should also allow that to happen?"

And the vote was overwhelmingly in favor of broadening marketing. That's the best way to settle something is to just take a vote.

Marketing may undergo another revolution. I'm waiting for it to happen. I want to be in on it too.

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask about your six decades or more into a career in marketing, that you're continuously researching the cutting edge. Any tips or what's your secret to doing this?

Philip Kotler: Well, some of it must be genes. Everyone has a set of genes. I was lucky to have good health. I've always been interested in learning everything there is to learn in the world. I've had an Aristotelian appetite because Aristotle, in my mind, knew everything at that time. He wrote on poetics, he wrote on drama, he wrote on science, and so on. But different people come along, and some stay with one passion and do so well, and they move the whole area upward. But I've been interested in broad questions and what's happening in the world as well as what's happening in business at large.

The Marketing Lessons of Dale Chihuly and Studio Art Glass

Andrew Mitrak: And as far as your interest in a breadth and a wide range of topics, I know one of your interests is collecting contemporary studio art glass. I'm on this call from Seattle, and Dale Chihuly is a local icon. Just a fun question, I'm curious if there are any marketing lessons we could draw from the life and work and brand of Dale Chihuly?

Philip Kotler: Dale Chihuly put glass in the minds of everyone by not making more of the same. He was selling whatever he made of the same, but he wasn't going to stay making the same. He wanted to see how far you could push glass into being more than it is. So we go to a garden, and we see glass flowers growing. Or we look at a ceiling, and the ceiling is a piece of glass plane, but behind it are all kinds of beautiful things. This is in Las Vegas. Sometimes you're walking on a floor, and underneath it, there are some beautiful objects. There are many great glassmakers now, but he was the one who started it all.

And there's nothing quite like it. It's so vibrant and colorful, and it seems distinctive and highly imitated but never as good.

Andrew Mitrak: Dr. Kotler, thanks so much for your time. Are there any things that you'd like to promote or that listeners can look up, anything you'd like to plug?

Philip Kotler: Well, Andrew, I thank you. I'm coming out with a few new books because I get excited about other areas. For one, for example, has to do with small and medium-sized firms. Whenever I and others try to teach marketing, we always use Coca-Cola and McDonald's and big companies. So small companies are sitting in the audience and saying, "Yeah, but I'm a small company, can I use that? Do I have the amount of money that a big company, I don't have that amount of money." And we always get off of it by saying, "Oh, everything we said you could use in your business, however, whatever size it is." But the truth is that we don't have any book on marketing for small and medium-sized enterprises, for family businesses. We have some books, but they don't seem to, there isn't a standard yet for that. So one of the books we're coming out with will be on marketing for small and medium-sized businesses. And once we have the title start with family businesses because managing in the small, you see all the issues pop up.

Andrew Mitrak: Oh, gosh, and I am looking forward to that one. That's a personal passion area of mine. I look forward to reading that.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Kotler, thanks so much for your time. I really appreciate it. This has just been a wonderful conversation.

Philip Kotler: Thank you for starting your interest in the history of marketing because there's so much that we do know, but so much we still don't know. And absolutely, your explorations will be watched, I hope, very much by many, many people. And I want the professors to broadly know about the work you're going to prepare for their use in classrooms too.

Andrew Mitrak: Thanks so much.

Philip Kotler: So do successful marketing of your work.

*****

Recent Books Authored By Philip Kotler:

Philip Kotler and V. Kumar, Transformative Marketing, Macmillan, 2024.

Philip Kotler, Waldermar Pfoertsch, Fabio Guido Ulderico Ancorani, and Ivan Ureta Vanquero, Humanism in Marketing – Responsible Leadership and the Human-to-Human Approach, Springer 2024

Philip Kotler, Hooi Den Huan, and Iwan Setiawan, Marketing 6.0. The Future is Immersive, Wiley, 2024.

Philip Kotler, Hermawan Kartajaya, and Jacky Mussry, Reimagining Operational Excellence: Inspirations from Asia, Wiley 2024.

Gabriele Carboni and Philip Kotler, Enlightened Management, Amazon, 2024.

Waldemar Pfoertsch and Philip Kotler, B2B Brand Marketing, 2nd edition, 2025. (coming soon)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org

A podcast exploring the untold stories of how marketing evolved through conversations with marketing leaders, professors, authors, and historians - including Philip Kotler, David Aaker, Guy Kawasaki, Jagdish Sheth, V. Kumar, Shelley Spector, and more.

Hosted by Andrew Mitrak

marketinghistory.org

Transcript:

Imagine this. The year is 1900. You pick up a copy of the Webster’s English dictionary. You search for the word "marketing."

You don’t find it. That’s because it’s not there yet.

Flash forward to 2025 and you log in to LinkedIn. You search for "marketing." You’ll find more than 9 million marketers on the platform.

What happened? When did Marketing become a job people do every day?

Why is Marketing History Overlooked?

My name is Andrew Mitrak, and I’m one of those 9 million marketers. I've led marketing for a few startups. I founded and sold a marketing agency, and now I work as a marketer at one of the biggest companies on the planet.

But I have a confession to make.

I know shockingly little about the history of marketing. And my guess is I’m not alone.

Think about it. If you study economics, you learn about Adam Smith.

Study computer programming and you’ll hear about Ada Lovelace.

Physics? Isaac Newton.

Biology? Darwin.

In most disciplines you learn about the people, the theories, and the milestones that shape the field over time.

But not so much in marketing. When I was in school, we jumped straight to the strategies and tactics used today

But who were the pioneers? What were the big breakthroughs? And when did people start calling themselves thought leaders?

I have lots of questions. So I looked for answers.

First I looked for a book about the history of marketing. But I didn’t find what I was looking for.

There are books for academics, biographies of advertising professionals, and a lot of books about marketing strategy today, and marketing in the future, but there’s little about marketing’s past.

Phil Kotler: “The Father of Modern Marketing”

I started my adventure into marketing history and I emailed Dr. Philip Kotler.

Phil is a living legend. He literally wrote the book on marketing management.

Philip Kotler: Thank you for inviting me. I'm always excited to talk about the history of marketing and it where it's going.

Marketing was common sense, but finance was science.

Along comes my 1967 book that says marketing also has science to it.

My book gave prestige to marketing.

And after we talked, Phil introduced me to his colleagues.

Connecting with Marketing Legends

George Day: “I'm delighted to be able to share my story.”

Jagdish Sheth: “Having a different perspective became an asset for me.”

David Aaker: “The idea that brand is an asset, and there's brand equity and you can build it, changed everything.”

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with historians, biographers, museum founders, agency leaders, and former CEOs and CMOs. I’ve learned a bunch and felt super inspired.

V. Kumar: “Advertising has got three objectives: inform, persuade, and remind.”

Guy Kawasaki: “It is not about you. It is about them… You gotta work backward from the customer, not forward from what you want to do.”

Marketers are great storytellers. So these conversations are a lot of fun.

Larry Tye: “He was the most dazzling figure in the history of public relations.”

Shelley Spector: “It wasn't just PR that he did. I mean he was a part of history.”

Mark Tungate: “I was interested in advertising history, so I thought, ‘Maybe it's me that should do this.’"

And now, I want to share these conversations with you.

Introducing "A History of Marketing" Podcast

Introducing A History of Marketing, a podcast that explores the untold story of how marketing evolved.

Join me as we uncover the hidden history of the brands, the campaigns, and the brilliant minds that shaped the way we buy, sell, and market today.

Philip Kotler: “Marketing may undergo another revolution. I'm waiting for it to happen. I want to be in on it, too.”

Guy Kawasaki: “The very fact that I'm mentioned in a podcast with Philip Kotler with someone like Philip Kotler... I've arrived.”

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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit marketinghistory.org