Kotler’s application for a marketing job rejected by a top FMCG firm

Philip Kotler – the world’s leading strategic marketer is stunned. He had applied to a marketing role in one of the leading FMCG companies in the world – Gamble & Prosper (G&P). As a part of the initial screening process, Dr.Kotler had to appear for a psychometric test to test his suitability for the job. Dr.Kotler has failed to clear this test. We contacted Dr.Kotler to find out why he had applied to this job and his thoughts about this rejection. He said: “I have been widely praised by management experts, industry veterans and academicians for my contribution to the field of marketing. However I found out a couple of years back that I am not very popular among the MBA student community. Many b-school students have been hurling abuses at me for unnecessarily complicating simple stuff. I got to know that I was particularly infamous in India where most of the b-schools use my textbook for their marketing course. I have been getting a lot of threats from Indian b-school students in the recent months. I’ll not be able to share these threats in detail with you but some of them were serious threats and they forced me to stop all my consulting assignments and also teaching. I then decided to take up a low profile job at some FMCG firm in the marketing function and hence applied to G&P. But I am dumbfounded by my rejection.”

After a lot of effort from our side, we have been able to persuade Dr.Kotler to share some of the email comments that he received from Indian b-school students. Here are some excerpts:

1. “If you ever write another book on marketing or design another framework, I’ll kill you”
2. “You talk about consumer insight and market research. Did you EVER try to find out what the students of marketing really want to learn? Practise what you preach!”
3. “4 Ps, 5 Cs, 6 Qs, 8 Rs. What the hell? You know what we think about Kotler’s marketing? 3 Cs. Yeah – Common sense unnecessarily complicated beyond comprehension”
4. “I have already taken an education loan of Rs.10 lakhs. I don’t mind borrowing another 1 lakh. I’ll soon come to the US just to give you a tight slap.”
5. “Tu India aaja beta, main dekh loonga”

We are not in a position to publish most of the other comments because of the heavy use of expletives in them.

We then contacted G&P. This is what the company spokesperson Shruthi had to say: “Yes, it is true that Dr.Kotler’s application has been rejected. The psychometric test is an essential part of the selection process. There is no human intervention in the evaluation of candidates who take this test. The system evaluates and automatically rejects candidates based on certain parameters. These parameters have been designed by experts. The test is basically to find out how a candidate will fit into the G&P family. We call it ‘cultural fit’. We expect G&P employees to have certain personality traits and we firmly believe that only these people can contribute to the company’s growth. We ensure that there is cultural homogeneity among the employees. For instance all our employees eat only with their left hand, all our male employees wear shoes but do not wear socks, all our female employees wear neckties. We also examine this cultural fit in several rounds of interviews. The system intuitively identifies people who will not fit into the organisation and eliminates them. This is a tried and tested system designed by visionaries in the field of human resource management in collaboration with the HR team at G&P. So there is no question of reviewing Dr.Kotler’s application”

Dr.Kotler said that this rejection will not lower his morale and that he would continue his job search until some FMCG firm offers him a marketing role. We wish him the best in his job search.
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