Philip Kotler - H2H: The Genesis of Human-to-Human Marketing

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The book introduces us to the theme of human integrity and honor in the context of the marketplace. The book emphasizes that human values of trust and service to others are the foundations of human economic activity rather than the sale of commodities and luxuries. The book has reframed marketing as a way of solving crucial human problems, by emphasizing that human beings should be given primacy over the products we engineer or the profits we make.

For scholars and practitioners of marketing and business, the book takes one through a refreshing journey of exploring what truly constitutes human integrity in marketing. It encourages us to question our approach to marketingfrom a consumeristic frame to a service-dominant frame. It invites us to approach marketing as a tool for the holistic development of human societies and for meaningful viable business.

To achieve business goals, respecting the individual/human subject is fundamental rather than accelerating consumerism. The H2H marketing model evolved in this work is unique in several ways. Influenced by design thinking, service-dominant logic, and digitalization, it explains why marketing needs renovation. Further, it emphasizes how marketing needs to be practicedas a mindset, operational process, and management task characterized by a human-to-human interaction. Finally, it espouses the importance of trust and empathy in stating what marketing should be used for. I believe that the publication H2H Marketing is more than a book; it is a way of life that forces traditionally understood notions of marketing to be dispelled and replaced by human-centric approaches with wider social implications.

How does the future of marketing look like? Marketers around the world have been wondering. Many things have rattled the principles of marketing, and this is just the beginning of the re-orientation. The power of the customer has increased through the spread of the Internet, and tech companies are trying to utilize the scope of applications to change the habits of customers fundamentally. The 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic has added new uncertainties and brought new insights and geared the customer more to the real essentials of a human being. Around the globe, information creation and distribution have initiated new dynamics in markets, and customers have become more aware of options and possibilities available to them. In various degrees, digitalization has reached every corner of the world. Marketing automation and the use of artificial intelligence ( AI ) are making their way into everyday life. Marketing science now has the challenge to create new approaches to address the current situation.

Evolving and expanding from business-to-business (B2B) marketing, we have developed a new concept for human-to-human (H2H) marketing. With this publication, we wanted to bring together our cumulative experience and insights to help to form a better way of marketing. We are combining the latest marketing concepts, advances in design thinking, and newest service-dominant logic approaches, as well as the latest insights into digitalization.

During the last few years, we intensively researched in these areas, writing articles and books, designing and conducting courses, and working on many industrial and consumer strategy projects. It became clear to us that the way marketing was understood and how it was implemented was essentially responsible for its success. We concluded that the mindset in marketing was responsible for its outcome. To stay relevant and powerful, marketing thinking has to shift.

Over the years, marketing concepts have changed to create value and to stay relevant. Under the current circumstances, it is necessary to have a clear value orientation for any marketing activity. It has to be aligned with a focus on people-for-people benefits. The creation of human-to-human marketing establishes a new approach that puts human beings at the center of marketing. It taps into the conscious and subconscious priorities of humans as a means to successful marketing. Marketing should work for the people, not against them.

Many marketing concepts do not achieve the goals of this new human-to-human (H2H) mindset. Push marketing oriented on the 4P marketing mix no longer fits into the realities of the digital world. The Internet is bidirectional, if not multidirectional. Customer knowledge, customer pull, or even user-generated content is playing an increasingly important role. Logically, marketers must cleverly adapt to the influences of digitalization. Therefore, in this book, we introduce a new H2H marketing model to describe and clarify the approach needed to develop a new concept for H2H marketing.

This book is based on a German language publication called Das neue Marketing Mindset (Springer-Gabler 2019) from Waldemar Pfoertsch and Uwe Sponholz. It introduced the principle of storytelling, which we would like to use in this English publication too.