Philip Kotler (born May 27, 1931) is an American marketing author, consultant, and professor emeritus. From 1962 to 2018, he was the S. C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He is known for popularizing he concept of the marketing mix.

Kotler has written more than 80 books, including Marketing Management, Principles of Marketing, Kotler on Marketing, Marketing Insights from A to Z, Marketing 4.0, Marketing Places, Marketing of Nations, Chaotics, Market Your Way to Growth, Winning Global Markets, Strategic Marketing for Health Care Organizations, Social Marketing, Social Media Marketing, My Adventures in Marketing, Up and Out of Poverty, and Winning at Innovation. He has described strategic marketing as "the link between society's needs and its pattern of industrial response."

Kotler contributed to the development of social marketing, which applies marketing principles to encourage behaviors associated with healthier and safer lifestyles. He also introduced the concept of "demarketing" to aid in the task of reducing the level of demand. He developed the concepts of "prosumers," "atmospherics," and "societal marketing." He has been described by some scholars as "the father of Modern Marketing."

Kotler has served as a consultant to major corporations, including IBM, General Electric, AT&T, Honeywell, Merck, and Bank of America. He has also advised national governments on industrial competitiveness and place marketing strategies, particularly in Asia and Europe. His consulting work and lectures delivered in more than 60 countries have helped global organizations integrate social responsibility into business strategy.

Kotler's latest work focuses on economic justice and the shortcomings of capitalism. He published Confronting Capitalism: Real Solutions for a Troubled Economic System in 2015, Democracy in Decline: Rebuilding its Future in 2016, "Advancing the Common Good" in 2019, and Brand Activism: From Purpose to Action in 2018.

Philip Kotler's mother Betty (in girlhood — Buber), was born in the city of Chernivtsi, and his father Maurice Kotler (Kotlyaresky), was born in Nizhyn, a city in Ukraine (that time part of the Russian Empire), and emigrated in 1917 as teenagers. They settled in Chicago. Philip Kotler was the oldest of their three sons; he was born in Chicago on May 27, 1931.

Kotler attended DePaul University for two years before being admitted to the master’s program at the University of Chicago without completing a bachelor’s degree. He received a master’s degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1953 and a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1956. He studied under three Nobel Laureates in Economic Science: Milton Friedman, Paul Samuelson, and Robert Solow. He did a year of postdoctoral work in mathematics at Harvard University (1960) and in behavioral science at the University of Chicago (1961).

During his early education, Kotler studied not only economics but also law, statistics, and philosophy, developing a multidisciplinary academic background that later informed his analytical approach to marketing. He was admitted to graduate study at the University of Chicago without completing an undergraduate degree, an uncommon exception granted on the basis of academic merit.