Hey folks, I'm looking for some help on a project that I'm kicking off in a couple of weeks.

I'm going to do a series of 50 posts on the "50 greatest thinkers in modern marketing" By modern marketing, I mean in the last 40 years...give or take. I want the list to encompass folks like Ted Levitt who wrote Marketing Myopia in 1960, to modern-day word-of-mouth marketing mavens like Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell.

Please pass this post around and leave your favorites in the comments section. Oh, and teams of marketers like Peppers & Rogers and Huba & McConnell will likely be considered as a 'team' as separating them takes too much away from the list, while listing them separately doesn't give the whole picture.

The purpose of this is to something similar to the Personal MBA but for marketers. As a sponge for everything marketing, I figured this was a good project to take on to help share the best marketing knowledge and wisdom written over the past four decades.

The take away from this list will be a solid resource for current and up-and-coming marketers to sink their teeth into to get the best that the field has to offer!

The posts & profiles on the marketers will include some of the following:
- Links to major published works
- Long standing or impactful ideas that they've espoused that have stood the test of time
- Google mentions, Technorati mentions and their presence in the blogosphere
- What they're doing now (such as retired academics who've gone dark...)
- The key points that all new marketers should know about how they contributed to the profession
- References to their work in Wikipedia

Thanks to those who can lend their help on this project.

Just for starters, here's a few names to throw out:

- Ted Levitt, Marketing Myopia
- Richard Branson, audacious stunts & brave marketing plans
- Mark Granovetter, Strength of weak ties & social network theory (huge impacts in marketing today)
- Jay Conrad Levinson, Guerrilla marketing
- Martha Rogers & Don Peppers, Return on Customer, one-to-one marketing
- Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (huge in tech marketing strategy)
- Robert G. Cooper, the father of modern product management & marketing
- Jagdish Sheth, one of the earliest thinkers on Relationship Marketing and a leader in consumer behavior research
- Seth Godin, permission marketing, among other things
- Philip Kotler, author of many of the current ideologies in modern marketing
- Dr. Walter Carl, leading authority on modern word of mouth marketing thinking
- Jackie Huba & Ben McConnell, authors and leading authors on customer evangelism
- Steve Rubel, high profile blogger and innovator at the crossroads of new media & public relations

Who are YOUR greatest marketing thinkers? We've go a lot of ground to cover. Research, CRM, channel marketing, sales & promotional mix, advertising, etc...

Here are just a few that I think you are missing.

Ries and Trout - Positioning (this is the basis for so much what we do now)

Pine and Gilmore - Experience Economy (must read)

Phil Dusenberry - Then We Set His Hair on Fire (his tales of running BBDO, the importance of insights)

Doug Hall - Jump Start Your Business Brain and Jump Start Your Marketing Brain

Paco Underhill - Why We Buy

I will do some more thinking and spread the word...

Here are just a few that I think you are missing.

Ries and Trout - Positioning (this is the basis for so much what we do now)

Pine and Gilmore - Experience Economy (must read)

Phil Dusenberry - Then We Set His Hair on Fire (his tales of running BBDO, the importance of insights)

Doug Hall - Jump Start Your Business Brain and Jump Start Your Marketing Brain

Paco Underhill - Why We Buy

I will do some more thinking and spread the word...

Kim Klaver - New School of Network Marketing

I don't know if the ad guys should feature in this list

But some you could consider

Stephen King The father of advertising planning
Dan Wieden of Wieden Kennedy
Jay Chiat
Tom McElligott
Lee Clow
John Hegarty
David Abbott
Eric Kessels and John Krammer
David Lubbars

Great citizen-gnerated list, other candidates:

Howard Schultz - Founder of Strabucks, authior of Pour Your Heart into It -to be able to charge $5 for a coffee and have people come 20x a month for the benefit, brilliant

Douglas Atkin - The Culting of Brands - amazing conceptual thinker translating cult thinking to marketing

Scott Bedbury - author of "a brand new world" - concise, clear thinking on marketing - former head of marketing for Starbucks and Nike

Good luck with the list...look to my recent post for my own list of marketing conspirators

http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com/agentwildfire/2006/08/if_there_were_o.html

A few others for investigation:

Dan Kennedy for his direct marketing work.

George Lucas for his waiving his up front fee as director and negotiating to own the licensing rights and starting the collectable action figure market.

Malcom Gladwell, while not exclusive to marketing his ideas make explicit some of the things marketers have been attempting to do for many years.

Kathy Sierra and the Creating Passionate Users team.

Stephen Brown, a marketing professor at Ulster University - definitley deserves recognition for his work on postmodern marketing.

The stuff he was writing years ago isn't too disimilar to many of the concepts being hyped now

As advertising is my profession I had to look at the names listed and wonder why the first one on the list wasn�t Bill Bernbach?
I wonder where Dan Wieden, Jay Chiat, Tom McElligott, Lee Clow, John Hegarty his former employee David Abbott would be today if he, Ned Doyle and Mac Dane hadn�t started their agency in 1949 that changed it all. And someone left off my old boss Hal Riney who created Henry Weinhard�s campaign, Bartles and Jaymes, Gallo, Kawasaki, "Let the good times roll" and of course Saturn. I know that Hal had said many times that Bernbach and some very brave advertisers changed the marketing landscape of America and made it possible for him to succeed.
Mr. Bernbach set the stage for America to enjoy, see, read and listen to really creative advertising and then bought, used and recommended their products.
He was doing branding before Trout and Reis wrote their book, and I thank them for that book.
Bill Bernbach understood marketing strategy and its role in the creative process better than anyone I have ever worked with or for.
For example:
Avis Rent-a-car, When you�re No. 2 you have to try harder.
Volkswagen, Think small and many more.
Chivas Regal- The initial campaign from the 60�s that put Chivas on the map.
Mobil, when Bernbach took over the business in the 60�s he started doing drunk driving ads in 1966.
Close-up tooth paste.
Sara Lee, Everybody doesn�t love Sara Lee
Alka-Seltzer, I can�t believe I ate the whole thing.
Quaker Oats, Nothing is better for thee than me.
El Al Airlines, brilliant campaign after campaign.
Levy�s, �You don�t have to be Jewish to love Levy�s� You could only buy their bread in the NY area but their posters hung in every American
Bedroom, kitchen, office and dorm room.
Polaroid Camera, Brilliant and simple advertising that relaunched Polaroid.
Ohrbach�s department stores. It changed the way retail advertising was done in America.
Jamaica Tourism, tourism ads were never the same after that campaign.
Daisy commercial for the Democratic Party in 1964-the campaign changed the way political advertising was done.
Life Ceral, Mikey Likes It.
Heinz Ketchup, Slow Ketchup
Clairol, multi image print ads that let women see on one page all the choices they had in hair color.
Seven of Advertising Age�s Top 100 campaigns came from Mr. Bernbach�s environment. Number one is Volkswagen.
Of course one man couldn�t do it all but he created the environment and client respect where great creative marketing was done. I know, I was there.

Hi everybody on the site. I would like to point out one of my favorite marketing authors, Tom Asacker. His ideas on branding are fresh and go beyond what I would call Corporate Aesthetics. A brand is a relationship and you have to enhance the emotional experience in those relationships, that is what I have learnt from Tom Asacker. Apart from being an original thinker he is brilliant writer and blogger. All his pieces have a point of criticism and lack conventionalism. Just take a look at his blog at www.acleareye.com or read his awesome "A clear eye for Branding".

A couple more recommendations:

David Ogilvy (Oglivy on Advertising)

Herschell Gordon Lewis (various and numerous direct mail books)