These are exciting times in marketing. Recent surges in digital technologies have created a new, more engaging, more connected marketing world. Beyond traditional tried-and-true marketing concepts and practices, today’s marketers have added a host of new-age tools for engaging consumers, building brands, and creating customer value and relationships. In these digital times, sweeping advances in “the Internet of Things”—from social and mobile media, connected digital devices, and the new consumer empowerment to “big data” and new marketing analytics—have profoundly affected both marketers and the consumers they serve.

All around the world—across five continents, more than 40 countries, and 24 ­languages—students, professors, and business professionals have long relied on Kotler/Armstrong’s Principles of Marketing as the most-trusted source for teaching and learning about the latest developments in basic marketing concepts and practices. More than ever, the seventeenth edition introduces new marketing students to the fascinating world of modern marketing in a complete and authoritative yet fresh, practical, and engaging way.

Once again, we’ve added substantial new content and poured over every page, table, figure, fact, and example in order to make this the best text from which to learn about and teach marketing. Enhanced by MyMarketingLab, our online homework and personalized study tool, the seventeenth edition of Principles of Marketing remains the world standard in introductory marketing education.

Top marketers share a common goal: putting the consumer at the heart of marketing. Today’s marketing is all about creating customer value and engagement in a fast-changing, increasingly digital and social marketplace.

Marketing starts with understanding consumer needs and wants, determining which target markets the organization can serve best, and developing a compelling value proposition by which the organization can attract and grow valued consumers. Then, more than just making a sale, today’s marketers want to engage customers and build deep customer relationships that make their brands a meaningful part of consumers’ conversations and lives.

In this digital age, to go along with their tried-and-true traditional marketing methods, marketers have a dazzling set of new online, mobile, and social media tools for engaging customers anytime, anyplace to jointly shape brand conversations, experiences, and community. If marketers do these things well, they will reap the rewards in terms of market share, profits, and customer equity. In the seventeenth edition of Principles of Marketing, you’ll learn how customer value and customer engagement drive every good marketing strategy.

We’ve thoroughly revised the seventeenth edition of Principles of Marketing to reflect the major trends and forces that affect marketing in this digital age of customer value, engagement, and relationships. Here are just some of the major and continuing changes you’ll find in this edition.

• The seventeenth edition adds fresh coverage in both traditional marketing areas and on fast-changing and trending topics such as customer engagement marketing, mobile and social media, big data and the new marketing analytics, the Internet of Things, omni-channel marketing and retailing, customer co-creation and empowerment, real-time customer listening and marketing, building brand community, marketing content creation and native advertising, B-to-B social media and social selling, monetizing social media, tiered and dynamic pricing, consumer privacy, sustainability, global marketing, and much more.

• This new edition continues to build on its customer engagement framework—creating direct and continuous customer involvement in shaping brands, brand conversations, brand experiences, and brand community. New coverage and fresh examples throughout the text address the latest customer engagement tools, practices, and developments. See especially Chapter 1 (refreshed sections on Customer Engagement and Today’s Digital and Social Media and Consumer-Generated Marketing); Chapter 4 (big data and real-time research to gain deeper customer insights); Chapter 5 (creating social influence and customer community through digital and social media marketing); Chapter 9 (customer co-creation and customer-driven new-product development); Chapter 13 (omni-channel retailing); Chapters 14 and 15 (marketing content curation and native advertising); Chapter 16 (sales force social selling); and Chapter 17 (direct digital, online, social media, and mobile marketing).

• No area of marketing is changing faster than online, mobile, social media, and other digital marketing technologies. Keeping up with digital concepts, technologies, and practices has become a top priority and major challenge for today’s marketers. The seventeenth edition of Principles of Marketing provides thoroughly refreshed, up-to-date coverage of these explosive developments in every chapter—from online, mobile, and social media engagement technologies discussed in Chapters 1, 5, 14, 15, and 17 to “real-time listening” and “big data” research tools in Chapter 4, real-time dynamic pricing in Chapter 11, omni-channel retailing in Chapter 13, and social selling in Chapter 16. A Chapter 1 section on The Digital Age: Online, Mobile, and Social Media Marketing introduces the exciting new developments in digital and social media marketing. Then a Chapter 17 section on Direct, Online, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing digs more deeply into digital marketing tools such as online sites, social media, mobile ads and apps, online video, email, blogs, and other digital platforms that engage consumers anywhere, anytime via their computers, smartphones, tablets, internet-ready TVs, and other digital devices.

• The seventeenth edition continues to track fast-changing developments in marketing communications and the creation of marketing content. Marketers are no longer simply creating integrated marketing communications programs; they are joining with customers and media to curate customer-driven marketing content in paid, owned, earned, and shared media. You won’t find fresher coverage of these important topics in any other marketing text.

• The seventeenth edition of Principles of Marketing continues to improve on its innovative learning design. The text’s active and integrative presentation includes learning enhancements such as annotated chapter-opening stories, a chapter-opening objective outline, explanatory author comments on major chapter sections and figures, and Real Marketing highlights that provide in-depth examples of marketing concepts and practices at work. The chapter-opening layout helps to preview and position the chapter and its key concepts. Figures annotated with author comments help students to simplify and organize chapter material. New and substantially revised end-of-chapter features help to summarize important chapter concepts and highlight important themes, such as marketing ethics, financial marketing analysis, and online, mobile, and social media marketing. This innovative learning design facilitates student understanding and eases learning.

• The seventeenth edition provides 18 new end-of-chapter company cases by which students can apply what they learn to actual company situations. It also features 16 new video cases, with brief end-of-chapter summaries and discussion questions. Finally, all of the chapter-opening stories, Real Marketing highlights, and end-of-chapter features in the seventeenth edition are either new or revised.

• New material throughout the seventeenth edition highlights the increasing importance of sustainable marketing. The discussion begins in Chapter 1 and ends in Chapter 20, which pulls marketing together under a sustainable marketing framework. In between, frequent discussions and examples show how sustainable marketing calls for socially and environmentally responsible actions that meet both the immediate and the future needs of customers, companies, and society as a whole.

• The seventeenth edition provides new discussions and examples of the growth in global marketing. As the world becomes a smaller, more competitive place, marketers face new global marketing challenges and opportunities, especially in fast-growing emerging markets such as China, India, Brazil, Africa, and others. You’ll find much new coverage of global marketing throughout the text, starting in Chapter 1 and discussed fully in Chapter 19.

The seventeenth edition of Principles of Marketing builds on five major customer value and engagement themes:

1. Creating value for customers in order to capture value from customers in return. Today’s marketers must be good at creating customer value, engaging customers, and managing customer relationships. Outstanding marketing companies understand the marketplace and customer needs, design value-creating marketing strategies, develop ­integrated marketing programs that engage customers and deliver value and satisfaction, and build strong customer relationships and brand community. In return, they capture value from customers in the form of sales, profits, and customer equity.

   This innovative customer-value and engagement framework is introduced at the start of Chapter 1 in a five-step marketing process model, which details how marketing creates customer value and captures value in return. The framework is carefully developed in the first two chapters and then fully integrated throughout the remainder of the text.

2. Customer Engagement and Today’s Digital and Social Media. New digital and social media have taken today’s marketing by storm, dramatically changing how companies and brands engage consumers and how consumers connect and influence each other’s brand behaviors. The seventeenth edition introduces and thoroughly explores the contemporary concept of customer engagement marketing and the exciting new digital and social media technologies that help brands to engage customers more deeply and interactively. It starts with two major Chapter 1 sections: Customer Engagement and Today’s Digital and Social Media and The Digital Age: Online, Mobile, and Social Media. A refreshed Chapter 17 on Direct, Online, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing summarizes the latest developments in digital engagement and relationship-building tools. Everywhere in between, you’ll find revised and expanded coverage of the exploding use of digital and social tools to create customer engagement and build brand community.

3. Building and managing strong, value-creating brands. Well-positioned brands with strong brand equity provide the basis upon which to build customer value and profitable customer relationships. Today’s marketers must position their brands powerfully and manage them well to create valued brand experiences. The seventeenth edition provides a deep focus on brands, anchored by a Chapter 8 section on Branding Strategy: Building Strong Brands.

4. Measuring and managing return on marketing. Especially in uneven economic times, marketing managers must ensure that their marketing dollars are being well spent. In the past, many marketers spent freely on big, expensive marketing programs, often without thinking carefully about the financial returns on their spending. But all that has changed rapidly. “Marketing accountability”—measuring and managing marketing return on investment—has now become an important part of strategic marketing decision making. This emphasis on marketing accountability is addressed in Chapter 2, in Appendix 2 (Marketing by the Numbers), and throughout the seventeenth edition.

5. Sustainable marketing around the globe. As technological developments make the world an increasingly smaller and more fragile place, marketers must be good at marketing their brands globally and in sustainable ways. New material throughout the seventeenth edition emphasizes the concepts of global marketing and sustainable ­marketing—meeting the present needs of consumers and businesses while also preserving or enhancing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. The ­seventeenth edition integrates global marketing and sustainability topics throughout the text. It then provides focused coverage on each topic in Chapters 19 and 20, ­respectively.

Principles of Marketing, seventeenth edition, takes a practical marketing-management approach, providing countless in-depth, real-life examples and stories that engage students with marketing concepts and bring modern marketing to life. In the seventeenth edition, every chapter has an engaging opening story plus Real Marketing highlights that provide fresh insights into real marketing practices. Learn how:

• Amazon has become the poster child for direct and digital marketing. Its passion for creating superb online customer experiences has made it one of the most powerful names on the internet.

• Wildly innovative Google (…er, Alphabet) has become an incredibly successful new product “moonshot factory,” unleashing a seemingly unending flurry of diverse products, most of which are market leaders in their categories.

• Apple’s outstanding success has never been about prices; it’s always been about creating “life-feels-good” user experiences that make its products fly off the shelves despite their premium prices.

• Ultra-low-price Spirit Airlines is thriving despite industry-low customer experience ratings. You don’t get much when you fly Spirit. Then again, you don’t pay for what you don’t get.

• Nike—by far the world’s largest sports apparel company—does much more than just make and sell sports gear. The iconic brand creates customer value by building deep engagement and a sense of community with and between the Nike brand and its customers.

• Harley-Davidson’s market dominance comes from a deep understanding of the emotions and motivations that underlie consumer behavior. Harley doesn’t just sell motorcycles; it sells freedom, independence, power, and authenticity.

• Mighty Kellogg, the world’s largest cereal maker, may be losing its Snap, Crackle, and Pop as shifts in the marketing environment change how people today eat breakfast.

• Toy market leader LEGO uses innovative marketing research—lots and lots of it—to dig out fresh customer insights, then uses the insights to create irresistible play experiences for children around the world.

• Netflix uses “big data” and sophisticated marketing analytics to personalize each customer’s viewing experience. While Netflix subscribers are busy watching videos, Netflix is busy watching them—very, very closely.

• App-based car sharing service Uber is radically reshaping urban transportation channels in cities around the globe, making traditional taxi cab services innovate or risk extinction.

• Industrial giant GE has unleashed a remarkable array of digital and social media ­content that connects the brand with its business customers and positions the 130-year-old company as a youthful, contemporary technology leader in the new digital industrial era.

• High-flying Mountain Dew is “Doin’ the Dew” with brand superfans to build a passionately loyal and engaged brand community. It doesn’t just market to customers; it makes them partners in building the brand.

Beyond such features, each chapter is packed with countless real, engaging, and timely examples that reinforce key concepts. No other text brings marketing to life like the seventeenth edition of Principles of Marketing.

A wealth of chapter-opening, within-chapter, and end-of-chapter learning devices help students to learn, link, and apply major concepts:

• Integrated chapter-opening preview sections. The active and integrative chapter-opening spread in each chapter starts with a Chapter Preview, which briefly previews chapter concepts, links them with previous chapter concepts, and introduces the chapter-opening story. This leads to a chapter-opening vignette—an engaging, deeply developed, illustrated, and annotated marketing story that introduces the chapter material and sparks student interest. Finally, an Objective Outline provides a helpful preview of chapter contents and learning objectives, complete with page numbers.

• Real Marketing highlights. Each chapter contains two carefully developed highlight features that provide an in-depth look at real marketing practices of large and small companies.

• Author comments and figure annotations. Each figure contains author comments that ease student understanding and help organize major text sections.

• Reviewing and Extending the Concepts. Sections at the end of each chapter summarize key chapter concepts and provide questions and exercises by which students can review and apply what they’ve learned. The Objectives Review and Key Terms section reviews major chapter concepts and links them to chapter objectives. It also provides a helpful listing of chapter key terms by order of appearance with page numbers that facilitate easy reference. A Discussion and Critical Thinking section provides discussion questions and critical thinking exercises that help students to keep track of and apply what they’ve learned in the chapter.

• Applications and Cases. Brief Online, Mobile, and Social Media Marketing; Marketing Ethics; and Marketing by the Numbers sections at the end of each chapter provide short applications cases that facilitate discussion of current issues and company situations in areas such as mobile and social marketing, ethics, and financial marketing analysis. A Video Case section contains short vignettes with discussion questions to be used with a set four- to seven-minute videos that accompanied the seventeenth edition. End-of-chapter Company Case sections provide all-new or revised company cases that help students to apply major marketing concepts to real company and brand situations.

• Marketing Plan appendix. Appendix 1 contains a sample marketing plan that helps students to apply important marketing planning concepts.

• Marketing by the Numbers appendix. An innovative Appendix 2 provides students with a comprehensive introduction to the marketing financial analysis that helps to guide, assess, and support marketing decisions. An exercise at the end of each chapter lets students apply analytical and financial thinking to relevant chapter concepts and links the chapter to the Marketing by the Numbers appendix.

More than ever before, the seventeenth edition of Principles of Marketing creates value and engagement for you—it gives you all you need to know about marketing in an effective and enjoyable total learning package!

A successful marketing course requires more than a well-written book. Today’s classroom requires a dedicated teacher, well-prepared students, and a fully integrated teaching system. A total package of teaching and learning supplements extends this edition’s emphasis on creating value and engagement for both the student and instructor. The following aids support Principles of Marketing, seventeenth edition.