iDEAN Consulting, a Dhaka-based strategy consulting firm, announced that it will host Professor Dr. Philip Kotler in a live Facebook conversation with its founder, Mark Anupom Mollick, as part of its AI for Marketers Summit, per a press release shared with FS. The event and the conversation will take place live on Facebook on Thursday, 10 September at 9:00 PM Bangladesh time. The event is presented by SHWAPNO and supported by several other partners. The conversation is free to attend and will be streamed from the personal Facebook page of Anupom.
Kotler is 94. He wrote the textbook that most marketing students in Bangladesh still study today. Marketing managers who came up through a BBA or an MBA here learned segmentation, targeting, and positioning from his framework. However, many of them never had a chance to listen to him live, answering a question in real time. Naturally, the event has created quite a buzz on social media.
The event will open with a keynote from Professor Dr. Waldemar Pfoertsch, a professor of international business who co-wrote B2B Brand Management with Kotler, setting up the frameworks. Kotler's live conversation with Anupom will follow, focusing on how he sees marketing shifting in the age of AI, a topic he has written about extensively in his recent work on what he calls "Marketing 6.0."
A panel discussion follows, titled "AI in Marketing: Hype, Reality and Opportunities for Bangladesh." The panel will be moderated by Mahadi Faisal, Director of Marketing & Growth at SHWAPNO, and will feature six panelists, including Dr. Rezwanul Huque Khan, who teaches at IBA, University of Dhaka; Nafees Anwar Choudhury, who runs brand marketing at Grameenphone; Md. Azwaj Khan, who heads marketing at Prothom Alo; Binay Das, who leads marketing and sales at Eskayef Pharmaceuticals; Md. Tajdin Hassan, Chief Business Officer at The Daily Star; and Shuvasish Bhowmick, who runs ATEC Global.
One of several observations that Mark Anupom Mollick used as a founding thesis of iDEAN Consulting is about how people learn marketing in Bangladesh.
Most practitioners pick up their craft on the job, through trial, through watching a senior colleague, through whatever training a company happens to invest in. Formal, framework-based marketing education exists in university classrooms but rarely reaches working professionals in a form they can use immediately.
iDEAN built its business filling that gap, offering consulting practices and running structured programs like GrowthX and iMBA for people already deep into their marketing careers.
Streaming Kotler live from Anupom's own Facebook profile, free of charge, extends that same idea to a much bigger stage.
Forty thousand registrations for a Facebook Live event is a large number by any Bangladeshi marketing event's standard, online or offline.
A few things are at play here. Part of it is Kotler. Part of it is timing. While AI has taken over conversations around marketing, people still have more questions than answers.
Marketers in Bangladesh have spent two years watching AI tools multiply, with limited understanding about what actually works, how to approach AI, and what it all means.
A summit that puts pharma, telecom, media, and academia on the same panel signals that it can offer serious discussions around AI and marketing, helping participants get a sense of what it all means.
The session streams live on Thursday, 10 September, at 9:00 PM Bangladesh time from Mark Anupom Mollick's Facebook profile. Registration remains free and open at ideanconsulting.com/ai-for-marketers-summit.
