Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar

Philip Kotler, is the S. C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing emeritus at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. It is also rated Best Business School for the Teaching of Marketing. Professor Kotler has significantly contributed to Kellogg's success through his many years of research and teaching there. He did postdoctoral work in mathematics at Harvard University and in behavioral science at the University of Chicago. Professor Kotler is the author or co-author of 90 books including Marketing Management, the most widely used marketing book in graduate business schools worldwide. He has published over 170 articles in leading journals, several of which have received best-article awards. Professor Kotler was the first recipient of the Distinguished Marketing Educator Award (1985) given by the American Marketing Association (AMA). In 2014, he was inducted into the AMA Marketing Hall of Fame. He was the first chosen Legend in Marketing and his work was published and reviewed in nine volumes. Professor Kotler has consulted for such companies as IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Honeywell, Bank of America, Merck, and others in the areas of marketing strategy and planning, marketing organization, and international marketing.


Christian Sarkar is an author, entrepreneur, consultant, activist, publisher, and artist. He is the co-founder and editor of The Marketing Journal, an online magazine founded in 2016 with Philip Kotler. His work spans a wide range of areas from art to double loop marketing and technology entrepreneurship to the activist $300 House Project. In 2020, Sarkar was named to the Thinkers50 Radar chiefly due to his work on Brand Activism. The $300 House Challenge was issued by Christian Sarkar and Professor Vijay Govindarajan in the Harvard Business Review. The project launched a world-wide innovation contest resulting in a new design paradigm for affordable housing at the bottom of the pyramid. Several companies and start-ups were involved, including IKEA. The project included field initiatives in Haiti, Peru, Mexico, South Africa, Nepal, and the United States. In 2015, Sarkar began collaborating with Philip Kotler on FixCapitalism.com - an online resource dedicated to questioning the current state of US capitalism and creating a forum for exploring solutions and discussing the latest research findings on the topic. Sarkar collaborated with Philip Kotler to develop the Sarkar-Kotler framework for Brand Activism. They co-authored the book Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action in 2018. They also established an online resource for brand activism research at ActivistBrands.com.
In 2019, Sarkar and Philip Kotler began work on an open-innovation design challenge to "save humanity from itself - which evolved into The Wicked7 Project. An extension of their work on Brand Activism, Sarkar introduced the "ecosystem of wicked problems" at the Global Peter Drucker Forum in 2019. Sarkar and Kotler recruited a number of thought-leaders from business and the art world to act as advisers to the project. Resources and details are available to the public at Wicked7.org.