Today is the day of the marketing guru, Philip Kotler’s seminar on Marketing In Turbulent Times: Discovering Opportunities in a Recession with Chaotics Management System.
The seminar was held at the conference hall in KL Convention Centre and it started at 8.30am. I got in a little late, at about 8.45am and the room was already fully seated. I don’t know exactly how many people attended the seminar, but it was easily 1,000 people in that room.
It’s my first time seeing Philip Kotler in person and my first thought was that for a man of 78 years of age, he definitely looks very healthy and fit! And throughout the half day seminar, you don’t see his energy level sapping nor did he even stop for drinks of water whenever he was up on that stage delivering his thoughts and theories of marketing.
It started with Philip giving a general overview of the situation that is today, how many companies are reacting and behaving in times of a recession. He talked about how you can strategically plan ahead and what kind of strategies you can adopt instead of taking the easy “across the board” approach. He also shared many case studies of companies around the world on what they do in situations, how some of them think out of the box or deep within the box to continuously improve themselves.
All that led to the topic of putting in place some monitoring tools as a chaotic management system. He didn’t dwell in detail on this, but the general idea was shared as he explained the three fundamental things a company should do. Perhaps his new book, Chaotics, would talk about all that in detail.
After a tea break, the seminar continued with Philip Kotler taking us through the importance of the emerging market that is Asia. He focused more on how the ASEAN countries as a region can be a powerful bloc to the future to bring Asia up as the next big economy of the world. There were some interesting learnings from this session too.
Needless to say, I came away with good impression of the seminar, and the topics he touched on were spot on with what I do. So I found it relevant and money well spent. It would have been better if we could have talked more in detail about this whole marketing in turbulent times using his chaotic management system. But since this is a half a day seminar, there just isn’t time to drill down to more. Nevertheless, there were definitely things I took away with me at the end of the seminar.
Being such a well read man, he talked about many other authors and books in their own expert fields that supplement his work and I respect the fact that he gives credit where they are due and encourage participants to go and read up on those experts’ books instead of him giving away their content. I was jotting down a lot of the books he quoted and I’m now tempted to get some of them since they were highly regarded by the great Philip Kotler!
Anyone out there attended the seminar too? What did you think of it and what did you take away from it?
