About our authors Gary Armstrong is Crist W. Blackwell Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He holds undergraduate and masters degrees in business from Wayne State University in Detroit, and he received his PhD in marketing from Northwestern University. Dr. Armstrong has contributed numerous articles to leading business journals. As a consultant and researcher, he has worked with many companies on marketing research, sales management and marketing strategy.
But Professor Armstrongs first love has always been teaching. His long-held Blackwell Distinguished Professorship is the only permanent endowed professorship for distinguished undergraduate teaching at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Throughout his career, he has been very active in the teaching and administration of Kenan-Flaglers undergraduate program. His administrative posts have included Chair of Marketing, Associate Director of the Undergraduate Business Program, Director of the Business Honors Program and many others. Through the years, he has worked closely with business student groups and has received several UNC campuswide and Business School teaching awards. He is the only repeat recipient of the schools highly regarded Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, which he received three times. Most recently, Professor Armstrong received the UNC Board of Governors Award for Excellence in Teaching, the highest teaching honor bestowed by the 16-campus University of North Carolina system.
Philip Kotler is Professor Emeritus of Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. He received his masters degree at the University of Chicago and his PhD at M.I.T., both in economics. Dr. Kotler is the co-author of Marketing Management (Pearson), now in its 17th edition and the most widely used marketing textbook in graduate schools of business worldwide. He has authored more than 60 other successful books and has published more than 150 articles in leading journals. He is the only three-time winner of the coveted Alpha Kappa Psi award for the best annual article in the Journal of Marketing.
Professor Kotler was named the first recipient of four major awards: the Distinguished Marketing Educator of the Year Award and the William L. Wilkie Marketing for a Better World Award, both given by the American Marketing Association; the Philip Kotler Award for Excellence in Health Care Marketing presented by the Academy for Health Care Services Marketing; and the Sheth Foundation Medal for Exceptional Contribution to Marketing Scholarship and Practice. He is a charter member of the Marketing Hall of Fame, was voted the first Leader in Marketing Thought by the American Marketing Association, and was named the Founder of Modern Marketing Management in the Handbook of Management Thinking. His numerous other major honors include the Sales and Marketing Executives International Marketing Educator of the Year Award; the European Association of Marketing Consultants and Trainers Marketing Excellence Award; the Charles Coolidge Parlin Marketing Research Award; and the Paul D. Converse Award, given by the American Marketing Association to honor outstanding contributions to science in marketing. A recent Forbes survey ranked Professor Kotler in the top 10 of the worlds most influential business thinkers. And in a Financial Times poll of 1,000 senior executives across the world, Professor Kotler was ranked as the fourth most influential business writer/guru of the twenty-first century. He is considered by many to be the father of modern marketing.
Dr. Kotler has served as chairman of the College on Marketing of the Institute of Management Sciences, a director of the American Marketing Association and a trustee of the Marketing Science Institute. He has consulted with many major US and international companies in the areas of marketing strategy and planning, marketing organization and international marketing. He has traveled and lectured extensively throughout Europe, Asia and South America, advising companies and governments about global marketing practices and opportunities.
Sridhar Balasubramanian is the Roy & Alice H. Richards Bicentennial Distinguished Scholar, Professor of Marketing and Marketing Concentration Chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hills Kenan-Flagler Business School. He holds a Bachelor of Technology (Honors) degree from the Indian Institute of Technology (Kharagpur), an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management (Bangalore) and MA, MPhil and PhD degrees from Yale University. Leading business education publication Poets&Quants ranked him one of the Top 50 Business Professors in the World.
Professor Balasubramanian, commonly referred to as Dr. B, is an award-winning researcher, teacher and academic administrator. He has served as Senior Associate Dean for MBA programs at UNC-CH. His research and teaching interests are in the areas of market strategy and technology strategy, innovation and growth strategy, customer focus, globalization and sustainability, and managing competition. He also specializes in bringing tools and concepts related to innovation, market focus and customer focus into other functional areas, including the management of human resources. He has published pioneering, award-winning research on the impact of the internet, other technology-intensive channels and social media on marketing. His research has been cited more than 13,140 times on Google Scholar.
Professor Balasubramanian also excels in teaching. He has won best teacher awards eight times across different programs at UNC and was awarded the Kenan-Flagler Weatherspoon award for distinguished PhD teaching. He specializes in toolkit-based teaching, transforming cutting-edge knowledge into useful and usable toolkits that can be applied the next day. He also engages extensively with the corporate world and has worked with more than 50 organizations spread across North America, South America, Africa, Asia and Europe.
