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...