Before this post, I have never written anything on LinkedIn. But I suppose receiving my author copy of Marketing 5.0, which completes a trilogy, is a good cause of celebration.

If you have had the chance to read or listen to my presentation on Marketing X.0 trilogy, you would know that Marketing has come a long way. Not only that. I have also come a long way.

When we wrote Marketing 3.0, I was still a relatively young MBA student at Kellogg with zero writing experience. Fast forward more than ten years later; it is hard to believe that we have completed the trilogy. Despite more experience, I found writing Marketing 4.0 harder than writing Marketing 3.0. However, conceptualizing Marketing 5.0 is the hardest of them all, given the high expectations set by the previous two books. Thankfully, I have great, visionary mentors and coauthors in Philip Kotler and Hermawan Kartajaya. And so, we finally did it.
We have always considered Marketing 3.0 to be the ultimate stage of ‘traditional’ marketing. The entire building blocks of serving customers intellectually (1.0), emotionally (2.0), and spiritually (3.0) were complete. In Marketing 4.0, we pivoted to ‘digital’ and argued that marketing in the digital world does not rely solely on digital media and channels. The digital divide still exists; thus, marketing requires an omnichannel—online and offline—approach.

Marketing 5.0, the next step, is the application of human-mimicking technologies to create, communicate, deliver, and enhance value across the customer journey. One of the critical themes in Marketing 5.0 is what we call the next tech, a group of technologies that emulate human marketers’ capabilities. It includes artificial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP), sensors, robotics, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), Internet of Things (IoT), and blockchain.

The print and e-book are now available. I am still giving presentations on Marketing 5.0 throughout the year as well. Hopefully, it will paint a clear picture of how marketing will evolve in the next decade. Enjoy!