Sep 26, 2026
Kotler: A Marketing Guru, or the Marketer of the Mediocre?
An army of sloppy work, made-to-order theories and the bankruptcy of brands in the quantum age: a field reading on how marketing should be thought about after Kotler, from Fordist marketing to the age of tribes.
Marketing
Mediocrity
Culture
Marketing of the Mediocre
Great brands are not born from theories. Theories come after great brands and report what happened.®
Let’s not be unfair to Philip Kotler. He is one of the people who built the common language of modern marketing. He systematised marketing. He enabled companies to think about product, price, distribution, target audience, positioning, research and communication within a discipline.
The problem is not what Kotler did. The problem is that fifty years later we are still trying to find our way with the same map.
Because the world has changed. The consumer has changed. Media has changed. Distribution has changed. Brands have changed. Retail has changed. Technology has changed. Culture has changed. But the mental operating system of many marketing departments has not.
And today a large share of mediocrity in marketing comes not from ignorance but, on the contrary, from being too loyal to taught truths.
1. Marketing as an Assembly Line: Kotler’s Pure Fordism
1908. Detroit. Henry Ford designs the moving assembly line. The core logic is simple: break the work down. Standardise each part. Control the process. Increase repetition. Raise efficiency. Reduce uncertainty.
Fordism did not only create a way of producing cars. It created a management mindset: the idea that what can be standardised can be managed.
Over time, marketing management adopted the same mental architecture. Divide the market. Choose the target audience. Position. Define the product. Set the price. Distribute. Promote. Measure. Control. Repeat.
Marketing thus stopped being a living social phenomenon and became a management conveyor. The consumer was a passive buyer waiting at the end of the line. The company would design the product, set its price, decide its message and deliver it to the customer.
This model was extraordinarily functional in its time. But today the problem is this: the belt is still running. The consumer is no longer at the end of the belt.
The consumer produces content. Changes the brand. Interprets the brand. Lynches the brand. Grows the brand. Builds their own community. Recodes the product with different meanings. A TikTok video can have a bigger impact than a company’s three-year communication strategy.
Fordist marketing wants control. Today’s culture cannot be controlled. The first conflict starts here.
Made-to-Order Theories
Courage is not recklessness. But a calculator is not a strategy either.®
2. Publisher-Ordered “Dotted” Theories and the Semantic Void
Marketing 1.0. 2.0. 3.0. 4.0. 5.0. 6.0. I don’t think any discipline in history has narrated its own transformation with such tidy numbers.
At first glance it is very appealing. Whenever a new era arrives, the old version is updated. Human-centric marketing. Digital marketing. Technology. AI. Metaverse. New title. New book. New version.
My objection here is not to Kotler renewing himself. On the contrary, a thinker should follow change in the world. The problem is this: real life doesn’t change by version number.
Society doesn’t move from Marketing 3.0 to 4.0 overnight. Consumer behaviour doesn’t work like a software update. The previous paradigm isn’t deleted. The new one isn’t installed. Real life is dirtier, more complex, more contradictory and more chaotic.
Today the same person can be highly rational in the morning, completely emotional in the afternoon, status-driven in the evening and part of a micro-tribe on TikTok at night.
The problem is not versioning marketing. The problem is managers turning these versions into recipes to be memorised again. One more theory. One more framework. One more presentation. One more certificate. But the same meeting room. The same fear. The same mediocre decisions.
3. The 10% Dogma and the Calculator’s Murder
There is a sentence I have heard for years in many companies in Turkey: “What percentage of revenue should the marketing budget be?” Then come the benchmarks. The industry average. The consultant’s report. The competitor estimate. And often a magic number is reached: 5 percent. 8 percent. 10 percent. It doesn’t matter.
The problem is not the number. The problem is the way of thinking. Because according to this logic, a small company should have a small marketing budget because it is small. So how will a small company ever become big?
The moment you set a percentage of past revenue as the future’s marketing investment, you tie the future to the past. Revenue is low. The budget is low. Because the budget is low, visibility is low. Because visibility is low, growth is low. Because growth is low, next year’s budget is low again. And the company calls this “financial discipline”.
Yet creating a great brand sometimes requires investing in a claim too big to be explained by current revenue. The right question for the marketing budget is not “What percentage of revenue?” The right question is: “How much investment does the future we want to build require, and what is its economic model?”
Courage is not recklessness. But a calculator is not a strategy either.
The Army of Sloppy Work
4. The Army of Sloppy Work
The biggest problem of modern companies is not bad employees. There is a far more dangerous type: the mediocre professional who does everything right.
Arrives at meetings on time. Presentations are perfect. Knows the terminology. Manages the agency. Brings benchmarks. Reads dashboards. Reports KPIs. Never clashes with anyone. Makes no big mistakes. And does no big work either.
I call this the Army of Sloppy Work. Because the system produces these people.
Don’t take risks. Don’t get it wrong. Don’t defend an idea top management dislikes. Don’t contradict the research. Don’t step outside the benchmark. Don’t push what the agency says “won’t work”. Don’t question the industry standard.
The result? Campaigns no one would reject. Brands no one will remember. In corporate life, mediocrity is often not a performance problem. It is a career-safety strategy.
When it fails, your defence is ready: “The market research showed this.” “The agency recommended it.” “Competitors do the same.” “That’s the industry benchmark.” Nobody is to blame. And the brand slowly dies.
5. Gen Z and the Experience Economy
Classical marketing put the product at the centre. Then the benefit. Then the consumer’s need. Today’s young consumer doesn’t just use the product. They live inside it.
What they buy is sometimes not function. Identity. Belonging. Aesthetics. Visibility. An entry ticket to a community. The story they tell about themselves. Today experience is part of identity.
A coffee mug. A perfume. A sneaker. A phone. A bag. A restaurant. All become small pieces of how a person presents themselves to the world.
That is why segmenting the new generation only as “18–24, ABC1, urban” is almost meaningless. Within the same demographic group there are dozens of different aesthetic universes, value systems and micro-tribes. Same demographics. Completely different people.
6. Ouroboros Syndrome: Marketing That Eats Its Own Tail
The ouroboros is the symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Some companies’ marketing models are exactly like this.
Sales fall. The marketing budget is cut. Because the budget is cut, the brand becomes less visible. Because visibility falls, demand decreases. Because demand decreases, sales fall further. Because sales fall, the marketing budget is cut again. And management sees all of this as financial discipline.
The same loop exists in creativity. Risk is reduced. The agency produces a safe idea. The safe idea makes no difference. The campaign doesn’t work. People say “creativity doesn’t bring sales”. They turn to more performance advertising. The brand becomes even more ordinary. Then more discounts are needed. This time pricing power dies. The ouroboros keeps eating its tail.
After a point, the marketing department no longer creates markets. It takes orders. Orders from the CEO. Orders from sales. Budget from the CFO. Creative from the agency. Optimisation from the platform. The marketer’s job becomes coordinating parts instead of thinking. And so a strategic function turns into an operations department.
Tribes
7. Those Who Followed Kotler Sank, Those Who Broke the Dogma Survived: Live Brand Wars
When we look back at the stories of great brands, everything seems logical. After success, theory explains it easily. But when the decision is being made, the picture is not that clear.
This is one of the biggest dilemmas of marketing theory. Theory is strong at explaining a successful brand. It is much weaker at saying what should be done before creating one.
Kodak had data. Nokia had research. Giant retailers had consultants. Many large companies had budgets, people and distribution power. But they missed the cultural side of change.
Meanwhile, brands like The Ordinary broke the category’s sacred rules. Glossier built a community first, then developed products. Supreme used scarcity not as a distribution problem but as a desire engine. New brands sometimes grew by doing exactly what classical marketing said “don’t do”. Because real competition in the market is no longer only between products. It is between systems of meaning.
8. Liquid Sociology and Micro-Ghettos
Once there were three TV channels. Millions watched the same series. The same newspapers were read. The same stars were known. Today even four people in the same house can live in completely different media universes.
The TikTok algorithm shows everyone a different world. YouTube another. Instagram another. Reddit another. Discord another. People no longer live within a single mass audience. They live in micro-ghettos.
Aesthetic ghettos. Music ghettos. Gaming communities. Fitness tribes. Luxury communities. Minimalists. Sneaker culture. Clean girl. Quiet luxury. Streetwear. K-pop. Anime.
The marketing unit of this world is not the “segment”. It is the tribe. Because a segment looks for statistical commonality. A tribe creates shared meaning. Members of a segment may not know each other. Members of a tribe share the same symbols, language, rituals and references.
The new marketer is not only a consumer researcher. They are a bit of a sociologist. A bit of an anthropologist. A bit of a cultural critic. A bit of an economist. A bit of a data scientist. And a bit of a street person.
9. The New Marketing Paradigm
Old model: Research. Plan. Get approval. Implement. Measure. New model: Observe. Form a hypothesis. Test. Learn. Adapt. Scale.
The old model wants control. The new model wants adaptive capacity. The old model tries to reduce the risk of error. The new model accepts small mistakes as the cost of learning. The old model asks what the customer wants. The new model observes the desire the customer can’t yet express. The old model prepares a big campaign. The new model learns live through small experiments.
The old model studies the category. The new model studies culture. The old model targets the consumer. The new model joins the community. The old model sees marketing as a cost centre. The new model sees marketing as growth architecture.
The Road Not on the Map
10. How Should Marketing Be Thought About After Kotler?
For me, the new marketing mind has four core pillars.
Desire Management
Before asking which product the customer needs, understanding the question “Who do they want to be?” Because people often don’t buy products. They buy what the product says about them.
Cultural Catalysis
Not reporting a trend after it emerges, but seeing it while it is still a small cultural signal. In music. On the street. In language. In aesthetics. In communities.
Quantum Agility
Small experiments before giant one-year plans. Test in 48 hours. Learn in a week. Adapt in a month. Because speed is not only an operational advantage. It is an information advantage.
Financial Leverage Vision
Taking marketing out of being a creativity department. LTV. CAC. Margin. Pricing power. Retention. New customers. Category penetration. Organic growth. The marketer must speak not only the brand’s language but the company’s financial language too.
11. The Live Marketing Reflex
One of the most important things I have learned in the field over the years is this: there are no dead products. There are wrong stories.
Sometimes the product that has sat on the shelf for months isn’t changed. Its meaning is changed. Sometimes an ageing brand isn’t outdated. It’s talking to the wrong generation. Sometimes stock isn’t the problem. It’s wrongly positioned capital. Sometimes the customer doesn’t want the product. But they may want what the product can represent.
So the marketer’s reflex should not only be “How do I sell this product?” They should be able to ask: “Inside which story does this product become desirable?” Books teach categories. The field teaches exceptions. Big opportunities often hide in exceptions.
12. Cases from the Field
Zeki Triko
For a brand that had started to be perceived as “a mothers’ brand”, the problem wasn’t only the product. The problem was identity. The visual world changed. The woman the brand represented changed. The system of meaning around the product changed. And without changing the product, the perception of the product could change.
Loris
Perfume is not only about smelling good. It is identity. Memory. Status. Desire. A way of carrying yourself into the world. That is why marketing perfume only through product features means seeing half the category. When culture, community, retail experience, digital visibility, category architecture and commercial growth work together, a brand can move to another level.
Idle Stock
A product may fail in the sales report. The same product can be reborn with a different visual code, another usage context, a different price architecture or a new story. Because data says, “This product didn’t sell.” The question the marketer should ask is: “Why didn’t this product sell in this form?” That difference changes the whole strategy.
13. Final Word: The Illusion of Manageability
In my view, the biggest dilemma of Kotlerian management logic is that it gives marketers this feeling: if you understand the market well enough, you can manage it. Research. Segment. Plan. Position. Budget. Implement. Control.
As if all the variables were on the table. As if the consumer were predictable. As if the competitor were rational. As if culture were linear. As if technology would wait. As if crises kept to a calendar. They don’t.
The market is a living system. It is chaotic. Sociological. Psychological. Cultural. Economic. Technological. And it often moves much faster than the manager’s Excel file.
That is why the future marketer’s job is not to fully control the market. It is to learn faster within it, feel it better and adapt more bravely.
I’m not saying don’t read Kotler. Quite the opposite. Read him. Know the 4Ps. Know STP. Know Porter. Know Ansoff. Know Keller. Know Sharp. Know Taleb. Know Bourdieu. But don’t turn any of them into scripture.
Because theory is a compass. Not the geography itself. The marketer’s real job is not to memorise the map. It is to see the road that isn’t on it.
And perhaps this whole debate can be closed with one sentence: Great brands are not born from theories. Theories come after great brands and report what happened.
My Recent Posts
(Gökhan Akdağ)
©2026
What Is Marketing Consulting? How to Build a Marketing Strategy, Plan, Budget and Management Discipline
Oct 9, 2026
Marketing
What Is Retail Consulting? Store Management, Sales Growth, KPIs, Profitability and Retail Math
Oct 9, 2026
Retail
What Is Commercial Growth Consulting? How to Manage Sales, Marketing, B2B, Export, Organisation and Profitable Growth
Oct 9, 2026
Strategy
FAQ
01
What does GA Consulting do?
02
What is your approach?
03
How do projects progress?
04
What is your focus?
05
Which areas do you work in?
06
What value does it create for companies?
07
Which companies is it right for?
08
How long until a project delivers results?
Sep 26, 2026
Kotler: A Marketing Guru, or the Marketer of the Mediocre?
An army of sloppy work, made-to-order theories and the bankruptcy of brands in the quantum age: a field reading on how marketing should be thought about after Kotler, from Fordist marketing to the age of tribes.
Marketing
Mediocrity
Culture
Marketing of the Mediocre
Great brands are not born from theories. Theories come after great brands and report what happened.®
Let’s not be unfair to Philip Kotler. He is one of the people who built the common language of modern marketing. He systematised marketing. He enabled companies to think about product, price, distribution, target audience, positioning, research and communication within a discipline.
The problem is not what Kotler did. The problem is that fifty years later we are still trying to find our way with the same map.
Because the world has changed. The consumer has changed. Media has changed. Distribution has changed. Brands have changed. Retail has changed. Technology has changed. Culture has changed. But the mental operating system of many marketing departments has not.
And today a large share of mediocrity in marketing comes not from ignorance but, on the contrary, from being too loyal to taught truths.
1. Marketing as an Assembly Line: Kotler’s Pure Fordism
1908. Detroit. Henry Ford designs the moving assembly line. The core logic is simple: break the work down. Standardise each part. Control the process. Increase repetition. Raise efficiency. Reduce uncertainty.
Fordism did not only create a way of producing cars. It created a management mindset: the idea that what can be standardised can be managed.
Over time, marketing management adopted the same mental architecture. Divide the market. Choose the target audience. Position. Define the product. Set the price. Distribute. Promote. Measure. Control. Repeat.
Marketing thus stopped being a living social phenomenon and became a management conveyor. The consumer was a passive buyer waiting at the end of the line. The company would design the product, set its price, decide its message and deliver it to the customer.
This model was extraordinarily functional in its time. But today the problem is this: the belt is still running. The consumer is no longer at the end of the belt.
The consumer produces content. Changes the brand. Interprets the brand. Lynches the brand. Grows the brand. Builds their own community. Recodes the product with different meanings. A TikTok video can have a bigger impact than a company’s three-year communication strategy.
Fordist marketing wants control. Today’s culture cannot be controlled. The first conflict starts here.
Made-to-Order Theories
Courage is not recklessness. But a calculator is not a strategy either.®
2. Publisher-Ordered “Dotted” Theories and the Semantic Void
Marketing 1.0. 2.0. 3.0. 4.0. 5.0. 6.0. I don’t think any discipline in history has narrated its own transformation with such tidy numbers.
At first glance it is very appealing. Whenever a new era arrives, the old version is updated. Human-centric marketing. Digital marketing. Technology. AI. Metaverse. New title. New book. New version.
My objection here is not to Kotler renewing himself. On the contrary, a thinker should follow change in the world. The problem is this: real life doesn’t change by version number.
Society doesn’t move from Marketing 3.0 to 4.0 overnight. Consumer behaviour doesn’t work like a software update. The previous paradigm isn’t deleted. The new one isn’t installed. Real life is dirtier, more complex, more contradictory and more chaotic.
Today the same person can be highly rational in the morning, completely emotional in the afternoon, status-driven in the evening and part of a micro-tribe on TikTok at night.
The problem is not versioning marketing. The problem is managers turning these versions into recipes to be memorised again. One more theory. One more framework. One more presentation. One more certificate. But the same meeting room. The same fear. The same mediocre decisions.
3. The 10% Dogma and the Calculator’s Murder
There is a sentence I have heard for years in many companies in Turkey: “What percentage of revenue should the marketing budget be?” Then come the benchmarks. The industry average. The consultant’s report. The competitor estimate. And often a magic number is reached: 5 percent. 8 percent. 10 percent. It doesn’t matter.
The problem is not the number. The problem is the way of thinking. Because according to this logic, a small company should have a small marketing budget because it is small. So how will a small company ever become big?
The moment you set a percentage of past revenue as the future’s marketing investment, you tie the future to the past. Revenue is low. The budget is low. Because the budget is low, visibility is low. Because visibility is low, growth is low. Because growth is low, next year’s budget is low again. And the company calls this “financial discipline”.
Yet creating a great brand sometimes requires investing in a claim too big to be explained by current revenue. The right question for the marketing budget is not “What percentage of revenue?” The right question is: “How much investment does the future we want to build require, and what is its economic model?”
Courage is not recklessness. But a calculator is not a strategy either.
The Army of Sloppy Work
4. The Army of Sloppy Work
The biggest problem of modern companies is not bad employees. There is a far more dangerous type: the mediocre professional who does everything right.
Arrives at meetings on time. Presentations are perfect. Knows the terminology. Manages the agency. Brings benchmarks. Reads dashboards. Reports KPIs. Never clashes with anyone. Makes no big mistakes. And does no big work either.
I call this the Army of Sloppy Work. Because the system produces these people.
Don’t take risks. Don’t get it wrong. Don’t defend an idea top management dislikes. Don’t contradict the research. Don’t step outside the benchmark. Don’t push what the agency says “won’t work”. Don’t question the industry standard.
The result? Campaigns no one would reject. Brands no one will remember. In corporate life, mediocrity is often not a performance problem. It is a career-safety strategy.
When it fails, your defence is ready: “The market research showed this.” “The agency recommended it.” “Competitors do the same.” “That’s the industry benchmark.” Nobody is to blame. And the brand slowly dies.
5. Gen Z and the Experience Economy
Classical marketing put the product at the centre. Then the benefit. Then the consumer’s need. Today’s young consumer doesn’t just use the product. They live inside it.
What they buy is sometimes not function. Identity. Belonging. Aesthetics. Visibility. An entry ticket to a community. The story they tell about themselves. Today experience is part of identity.
A coffee mug. A perfume. A sneaker. A phone. A bag. A restaurant. All become small pieces of how a person presents themselves to the world.
That is why segmenting the new generation only as “18–24, ABC1, urban” is almost meaningless. Within the same demographic group there are dozens of different aesthetic universes, value systems and micro-tribes. Same demographics. Completely different people.
6. Ouroboros Syndrome: Marketing That Eats Its Own Tail
The ouroboros is the symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Some companies’ marketing models are exactly like this.
Sales fall. The marketing budget is cut. Because the budget is cut, the brand becomes less visible. Because visibility falls, demand decreases. Because demand decreases, sales fall further. Because sales fall, the marketing budget is cut again. And management sees all of this as financial discipline.
The same loop exists in creativity. Risk is reduced. The agency produces a safe idea. The safe idea makes no difference. The campaign doesn’t work. People say “creativity doesn’t bring sales”. They turn to more performance advertising. The brand becomes even more ordinary. Then more discounts are needed. This time pricing power dies. The ouroboros keeps eating its tail.
After a point, the marketing department no longer creates markets. It takes orders. Orders from the CEO. Orders from sales. Budget from the CFO. Creative from the agency. Optimisation from the platform. The marketer’s job becomes coordinating parts instead of thinking. And so a strategic function turns into an operations department.
Tribes
7. Those Who Followed Kotler Sank, Those Who Broke the Dogma Survived: Live Brand Wars
When we look back at the stories of great brands, everything seems logical. After success, theory explains it easily. But when the decision is being made, the picture is not that clear.
This is one of the biggest dilemmas of marketing theory. Theory is strong at explaining a successful brand. It is much weaker at saying what should be done before creating one.
Kodak had data. Nokia had research. Giant retailers had consultants. Many large companies had budgets, people and distribution power. But they missed the cultural side of change.
Meanwhile, brands like The Ordinary broke the category’s sacred rules. Glossier built a community first, then developed products. Supreme used scarcity not as a distribution problem but as a desire engine. New brands sometimes grew by doing exactly what classical marketing said “don’t do”. Because real competition in the market is no longer only between products. It is between systems of meaning.
8. Liquid Sociology and Micro-Ghettos
Once there were three TV channels. Millions watched the same series. The same newspapers were read. The same stars were known. Today even four people in the same house can live in completely different media universes.
The TikTok algorithm shows everyone a different world. YouTube another. Instagram another. Reddit another. Discord another. People no longer live within a single mass audience. They live in micro-ghettos.
Aesthetic ghettos. Music ghettos. Gaming communities. Fitness tribes. Luxury communities. Minimalists. Sneaker culture. Clean girl. Quiet luxury. Streetwear. K-pop. Anime.
The marketing unit of this world is not the “segment”. It is the tribe. Because a segment looks for statistical commonality. A tribe creates shared meaning. Members of a segment may not know each other. Members of a tribe share the same symbols, language, rituals and references.
The new marketer is not only a consumer researcher. They are a bit of a sociologist. A bit of an anthropologist. A bit of a cultural critic. A bit of an economist. A bit of a data scientist. And a bit of a street person.
9. The New Marketing Paradigm
Old model: Research. Plan. Get approval. Implement. Measure. New model: Observe. Form a hypothesis. Test. Learn. Adapt. Scale.
The old model wants control. The new model wants adaptive capacity. The old model tries to reduce the risk of error. The new model accepts small mistakes as the cost of learning. The old model asks what the customer wants. The new model observes the desire the customer can’t yet express. The old model prepares a big campaign. The new model learns live through small experiments.
The old model studies the category. The new model studies culture. The old model targets the consumer. The new model joins the community. The old model sees marketing as a cost centre. The new model sees marketing as growth architecture.
The Road Not on the Map
10. How Should Marketing Be Thought About After Kotler?
For me, the new marketing mind has four core pillars.
Desire Management
Before asking which product the customer needs, understanding the question “Who do they want to be?” Because people often don’t buy products. They buy what the product says about them.
Cultural Catalysis
Not reporting a trend after it emerges, but seeing it while it is still a small cultural signal. In music. On the street. In language. In aesthetics. In communities.
Quantum Agility
Small experiments before giant one-year plans. Test in 48 hours. Learn in a week. Adapt in a month. Because speed is not only an operational advantage. It is an information advantage.
Financial Leverage Vision
Taking marketing out of being a creativity department. LTV. CAC. Margin. Pricing power. Retention. New customers. Category penetration. Organic growth. The marketer must speak not only the brand’s language but the company’s financial language too.
11. The Live Marketing Reflex
One of the most important things I have learned in the field over the years is this: there are no dead products. There are wrong stories.
Sometimes the product that has sat on the shelf for months isn’t changed. Its meaning is changed. Sometimes an ageing brand isn’t outdated. It’s talking to the wrong generation. Sometimes stock isn’t the problem. It’s wrongly positioned capital. Sometimes the customer doesn’t want the product. But they may want what the product can represent.
So the marketer’s reflex should not only be “How do I sell this product?” They should be able to ask: “Inside which story does this product become desirable?” Books teach categories. The field teaches exceptions. Big opportunities often hide in exceptions.
12. Cases from the Field
Zeki Triko
For a brand that had started to be perceived as “a mothers’ brand”, the problem wasn’t only the product. The problem was identity. The visual world changed. The woman the brand represented changed. The system of meaning around the product changed. And without changing the product, the perception of the product could change.
Loris
Perfume is not only about smelling good. It is identity. Memory. Status. Desire. A way of carrying yourself into the world. That is why marketing perfume only through product features means seeing half the category. When culture, community, retail experience, digital visibility, category architecture and commercial growth work together, a brand can move to another level.
Idle Stock
A product may fail in the sales report. The same product can be reborn with a different visual code, another usage context, a different price architecture or a new story. Because data says, “This product didn’t sell.” The question the marketer should ask is: “Why didn’t this product sell in this form?” That difference changes the whole strategy.
13. Final Word: The Illusion of Manageability
In my view, the biggest dilemma of Kotlerian management logic is that it gives marketers this feeling: if you understand the market well enough, you can manage it. Research. Segment. Plan. Position. Budget. Implement. Control.
As if all the variables were on the table. As if the consumer were predictable. As if the competitor were rational. As if culture were linear. As if technology would wait. As if crises kept to a calendar. They don’t.
The market is a living system. It is chaotic. Sociological. Psychological. Cultural. Economic. Technological. And it often moves much faster than the manager’s Excel file.
That is why the future marketer’s job is not to fully control the market. It is to learn faster within it, feel it better and adapt more bravely.
I’m not saying don’t read Kotler. Quite the opposite. Read him. Know the 4Ps. Know STP. Know Porter. Know Ansoff. Know Keller. Know Sharp. Know Taleb. Know Bourdieu. But don’t turn any of them into scripture.
Because theory is a compass. Not the geography itself. The marketer’s real job is not to memorise the map. It is to see the road that isn’t on it.
And perhaps this whole debate can be closed with one sentence: Great brands are not born from theories. Theories come after great brands and report what happened.
My Recent Posts
(Gökhan Akdağ)
©2026
What Is Marketing Consulting? How to Build a Marketing Strategy, Plan, Budget and Management Discipline
Oct 9, 2026
Marketing
What Is Retail Consulting? Store Management, Sales Growth, KPIs, Profitability and Retail Math
Oct 9, 2026
Retail
What Is Commercial Growth Consulting? How to Manage Sales, Marketing, B2B, Export, Organisation and Profitable Growth
Oct 9, 2026
Strategy
FAQ
01
What does GA Consulting do?
02
What is your approach?
03
How do projects progress?
04
What is your focus?
05
Which areas do you work in?
06
What value does it create for companies?
07
Which companies is it right for?
08
How long until a project delivers results?
Sep 26, 2026
Kotler: A Marketing Guru, or the Marketer of the Mediocre?
An army of sloppy work, made-to-order theories and the bankruptcy of brands in the quantum age: a field reading on how marketing should be thought about after Kotler, from Fordist marketing to the age of tribes.
Marketing
Mediocrity
Culture
Marketing of the Mediocre
Great brands are not born from theories. Theories come after great brands and report what happened.®
Let’s not be unfair to Philip Kotler. He is one of the people who built the common language of modern marketing. He systematised marketing. He enabled companies to think about product, price, distribution, target audience, positioning, research and communication within a discipline.
The problem is not what Kotler did. The problem is that fifty years later we are still trying to find our way with the same map.
Because the world has changed. The consumer has changed. Media has changed. Distribution has changed. Brands have changed. Retail has changed. Technology has changed. Culture has changed. But the mental operating system of many marketing departments has not.
And today a large share of mediocrity in marketing comes not from ignorance but, on the contrary, from being too loyal to taught truths.
1. Marketing as an Assembly Line: Kotler’s Pure Fordism
1908. Detroit. Henry Ford designs the moving assembly line. The core logic is simple: break the work down. Standardise each part. Control the process. Increase repetition. Raise efficiency. Reduce uncertainty.
Fordism did not only create a way of producing cars. It created a management mindset: the idea that what can be standardised can be managed.
Over time, marketing management adopted the same mental architecture. Divide the market. Choose the target audience. Position. Define the product. Set the price. Distribute. Promote. Measure. Control. Repeat.
Marketing thus stopped being a living social phenomenon and became a management conveyor. The consumer was a passive buyer waiting at the end of the line. The company would design the product, set its price, decide its message and deliver it to the customer.
This model was extraordinarily functional in its time. But today the problem is this: the belt is still running. The consumer is no longer at the end of the belt.
The consumer produces content. Changes the brand. Interprets the brand. Lynches the brand. Grows the brand. Builds their own community. Recodes the product with different meanings. A TikTok video can have a bigger impact than a company’s three-year communication strategy.
Fordist marketing wants control. Today’s culture cannot be controlled. The first conflict starts here.
Made-to-Order Theories
Courage is not recklessness. But a calculator is not a strategy either.®
2. Publisher-Ordered “Dotted” Theories and the Semantic Void
Marketing 1.0. 2.0. 3.0. 4.0. 5.0. 6.0. I don’t think any discipline in history has narrated its own transformation with such tidy numbers.
At first glance it is very appealing. Whenever a new era arrives, the old version is updated. Human-centric marketing. Digital marketing. Technology. AI. Metaverse. New title. New book. New version.
My objection here is not to Kotler renewing himself. On the contrary, a thinker should follow change in the world. The problem is this: real life doesn’t change by version number.
Society doesn’t move from Marketing 3.0 to 4.0 overnight. Consumer behaviour doesn’t work like a software update. The previous paradigm isn’t deleted. The new one isn’t installed. Real life is dirtier, more complex, more contradictory and more chaotic.
Today the same person can be highly rational in the morning, completely emotional in the afternoon, status-driven in the evening and part of a micro-tribe on TikTok at night.
The problem is not versioning marketing. The problem is managers turning these versions into recipes to be memorised again. One more theory. One more framework. One more presentation. One more certificate. But the same meeting room. The same fear. The same mediocre decisions.
3. The 10% Dogma and the Calculator’s Murder
There is a sentence I have heard for years in many companies in Turkey: “What percentage of revenue should the marketing budget be?” Then come the benchmarks. The industry average. The consultant’s report. The competitor estimate. And often a magic number is reached: 5 percent. 8 percent. 10 percent. It doesn’t matter.
The problem is not the number. The problem is the way of thinking. Because according to this logic, a small company should have a small marketing budget because it is small. So how will a small company ever become big?
The moment you set a percentage of past revenue as the future’s marketing investment, you tie the future to the past. Revenue is low. The budget is low. Because the budget is low, visibility is low. Because visibility is low, growth is low. Because growth is low, next year’s budget is low again. And the company calls this “financial discipline”.
Yet creating a great brand sometimes requires investing in a claim too big to be explained by current revenue. The right question for the marketing budget is not “What percentage of revenue?” The right question is: “How much investment does the future we want to build require, and what is its economic model?”
Courage is not recklessness. But a calculator is not a strategy either.
The Army of Sloppy Work
4. The Army of Sloppy Work
The biggest problem of modern companies is not bad employees. There is a far more dangerous type: the mediocre professional who does everything right.
Arrives at meetings on time. Presentations are perfect. Knows the terminology. Manages the agency. Brings benchmarks. Reads dashboards. Reports KPIs. Never clashes with anyone. Makes no big mistakes. And does no big work either.
I call this the Army of Sloppy Work. Because the system produces these people.
Don’t take risks. Don’t get it wrong. Don’t defend an idea top management dislikes. Don’t contradict the research. Don’t step outside the benchmark. Don’t push what the agency says “won’t work”. Don’t question the industry standard.
The result? Campaigns no one would reject. Brands no one will remember. In corporate life, mediocrity is often not a performance problem. It is a career-safety strategy.
When it fails, your defence is ready: “The market research showed this.” “The agency recommended it.” “Competitors do the same.” “That’s the industry benchmark.” Nobody is to blame. And the brand slowly dies.
5. Gen Z and the Experience Economy
Classical marketing put the product at the centre. Then the benefit. Then the consumer’s need. Today’s young consumer doesn’t just use the product. They live inside it.
What they buy is sometimes not function. Identity. Belonging. Aesthetics. Visibility. An entry ticket to a community. The story they tell about themselves. Today experience is part of identity.
A coffee mug. A perfume. A sneaker. A phone. A bag. A restaurant. All become small pieces of how a person presents themselves to the world.
That is why segmenting the new generation only as “18–24, ABC1, urban” is almost meaningless. Within the same demographic group there are dozens of different aesthetic universes, value systems and micro-tribes. Same demographics. Completely different people.
6. Ouroboros Syndrome: Marketing That Eats Its Own Tail
The ouroboros is the symbol of a snake eating its own tail. Some companies’ marketing models are exactly like this.
Sales fall. The marketing budget is cut. Because the budget is cut, the brand becomes less visible. Because visibility falls, demand decreases. Because demand decreases, sales fall further. Because sales fall, the marketing budget is cut again. And management sees all of this as financial discipline.
The same loop exists in creativity. Risk is reduced. The agency produces a safe idea. The safe idea makes no difference. The campaign doesn’t work. People say “creativity doesn’t bring sales”. They turn to more performance advertising. The brand becomes even more ordinary. Then more discounts are needed. This time pricing power dies. The ouroboros keeps eating its tail.
After a point, the marketing department no longer creates markets. It takes orders. Orders from the CEO. Orders from sales. Budget from the CFO. Creative from the agency. Optimisation from the platform. The marketer’s job becomes coordinating parts instead of thinking. And so a strategic function turns into an operations department.
Tribes
7. Those Who Followed Kotler Sank, Those Who Broke the Dogma Survived: Live Brand Wars
When we look back at the stories of great brands, everything seems logical. After success, theory explains it easily. But when the decision is being made, the picture is not that clear.
This is one of the biggest dilemmas of marketing theory. Theory is strong at explaining a successful brand. It is much weaker at saying what should be done before creating one.
Kodak had data. Nokia had research. Giant retailers had consultants. Many large companies had budgets, people and distribution power. But they missed the cultural side of change.
Meanwhile, brands like The Ordinary broke the category’s sacred rules. Glossier built a community first, then developed products. Supreme used scarcity not as a distribution problem but as a desire engine. New brands sometimes grew by doing exactly what classical marketing said “don’t do”. Because real competition in the market is no longer only between products. It is between systems of meaning.
8. Liquid Sociology and Micro-Ghettos
Once there were three TV channels. Millions watched the same series. The same newspapers were read. The same stars were known. Today even four people in the same house can live in completely different media universes.
The TikTok algorithm shows everyone a different world. YouTube another. Instagram another. Reddit another. Discord another. People no longer live within a single mass audience. They live in micro-ghettos.
Aesthetic ghettos. Music ghettos. Gaming communities. Fitness tribes. Luxury communities. Minimalists. Sneaker culture. Clean girl. Quiet luxury. Streetwear. K-pop. Anime.
The marketing unit of this world is not the “segment”. It is the tribe. Because a segment looks for statistical commonality. A tribe creates shared meaning. Members of a segment may not know each other. Members of a tribe share the same symbols, language, rituals and references.
The new marketer is not only a consumer researcher. They are a bit of a sociologist. A bit of an anthropologist. A bit of a cultural critic. A bit of an economist. A bit of a data scientist. And a bit of a street person.
9. The New Marketing Paradigm
Old model: Research. Plan. Get approval. Implement. Measure. New model: Observe. Form a hypothesis. Test. Learn. Adapt. Scale.
The old model wants control. The new model wants adaptive capacity. The old model tries to reduce the risk of error. The new model accepts small mistakes as the cost of learning. The old model asks what the customer wants. The new model observes the desire the customer can’t yet express. The old model prepares a big campaign. The new model learns live through small experiments.
The old model studies the category. The new model studies culture. The old model targets the consumer. The new model joins the community. The old model sees marketing as a cost centre. The new model sees marketing as growth architecture.
The Road Not on the Map
10. How Should Marketing Be Thought About After Kotler?
For me, the new marketing mind has four core pillars.
Desire Management
Before asking which product the customer needs, understanding the question “Who do they want to be?” Because people often don’t buy products. They buy what the product says about them.
Cultural Catalysis
Not reporting a trend after it emerges, but seeing it while it is still a small cultural signal. In music. On the street. In language. In aesthetics. In communities.
Quantum Agility
Small experiments before giant one-year plans. Test in 48 hours. Learn in a week. Adapt in a month. Because speed is not only an operational advantage. It is an information advantage.
Financial Leverage Vision
Taking marketing out of being a creativity department. LTV. CAC. Margin. Pricing power. Retention. New customers. Category penetration. Organic growth. The marketer must speak not only the brand’s language but the company’s financial language too.
11. The Live Marketing Reflex
One of the most important things I have learned in the field over the years is this: there are no dead products. There are wrong stories.
Sometimes the product that has sat on the shelf for months isn’t changed. Its meaning is changed. Sometimes an ageing brand isn’t outdated. It’s talking to the wrong generation. Sometimes stock isn’t the problem. It’s wrongly positioned capital. Sometimes the customer doesn’t want the product. But they may want what the product can represent.
So the marketer’s reflex should not only be “How do I sell this product?” They should be able to ask: “Inside which story does this product become desirable?” Books teach categories. The field teaches exceptions. Big opportunities often hide in exceptions.
12. Cases from the Field
Zeki Triko
For a brand that had started to be perceived as “a mothers’ brand”, the problem wasn’t only the product. The problem was identity. The visual world changed. The woman the brand represented changed. The system of meaning around the product changed. And without changing the product, the perception of the product could change.
Loris
Perfume is not only about smelling good. It is identity. Memory. Status. Desire. A way of carrying yourself into the world. That is why marketing perfume only through product features means seeing half the category. When culture, community, retail experience, digital visibility, category architecture and commercial growth work together, a brand can move to another level.
Idle Stock
A product may fail in the sales report. The same product can be reborn with a different visual code, another usage context, a different price architecture or a new story. Because data says, “This product didn’t sell.” The question the marketer should ask is: “Why didn’t this product sell in this form?” That difference changes the whole strategy.
13. Final Word: The Illusion of Manageability
In my view, the biggest dilemma of Kotlerian management logic is that it gives marketers this feeling: if you understand the market well enough, you can manage it. Research. Segment. Plan. Position. Budget. Implement. Control.
As if all the variables were on the table. As if the consumer were predictable. As if the competitor were rational. As if culture were linear. As if technology would wait. As if crises kept to a calendar. They don’t.
The market is a living system. It is chaotic. Sociological. Psychological. Cultural. Economic. Technological. And it often moves much faster than the manager’s Excel file.
That is why the future marketer’s job is not to fully control the market. It is to learn faster within it, feel it better and adapt more bravely.
I’m not saying don’t read Kotler. Quite the opposite. Read him. Know the 4Ps. Know STP. Know Porter. Know Ansoff. Know Keller. Know Sharp. Know Taleb. Know Bourdieu. But don’t turn any of them into scripture.
Because theory is a compass. Not the geography itself. The marketer’s real job is not to memorise the map. It is to see the road that isn’t on it.
And perhaps this whole debate can be closed with one sentence: Great brands are not born from theories. Theories come after great brands and report what happened.
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