Philip Kotler is a marketing consultant and a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University in Chicago.  He’s probably the world’s most influential thinker on strategic marketing.  He’s on any number of top ten lists of important business gurus.  He’s written more than 40 books, including some of the basic textbooks in the marketing field, such as Marketing Management (http://tinyurl.com/y9kjxo3) and Principles of Marketing (http://tinyurl.com/ya293jw).

Here he is talking about the brand called you: http://tinyurl.com/kp66nh.  Here’s his speaker video: http://tinyurl.com/yfyc7tb.  And here he is speaking at the London Business Forum: http://tinyurl.com/599hvs.

What these videos show is a ponderous speaker very much in the old-fashioned academic style, long on substance and short on style.  Not very entertaining, very straightforward, and a little behind the times.  But sincere, completely authoritative and obviously smart. 

The London Business Forum video reveals in addition a speaker who has never completely mastered the choreography of the stage:  he wanders back and forth with that irritating absence of thought and excess of adrenaline that has caused many a nervous talker to get happy feet.  This behavior is also very typical of the professor who is thinking as he goes, with only a general outline in his head about where he might end up.  A tenured professor can get away with it, but that doesn’t make it right. 

Kotler will give you the basics; go to someone else for pizzazz.