If adding value to a product is now a common practice in the field of commercial communication, ensuring that the value itself becomes a sort of “brand” and that it is “sold” as such, is still a kind of groundbreaking practice, the privileged field of Institutional communication. It is exactly to reflect on the challenges connected to this kind of communication that Philip Kotler was invited on the stage of the Marketing Forum of the same name, which took place last May 15^th in Milan.

After a far-reaching speech on the present and the future of marketing, ranging from the role of social media to sharing economy and consumer empowerment, Kotler took part in the lecture “Expo 2015: the European vision of the citizen-consumer”, together with the EU Deputy Commissioner General Giancarlo Caratti and Franco Pomilio, ICS Chairman and CEO of Pomilio Blumm. 

«Institutions too – Kotler explains – should develop a communicative talent in order to dialogue with citizens, convey values, support ideas progress. For instance, if  the message is “do not waste”, we need to go from marketing to a sort of  “demarketing”, from the invite to consume to the request to reduce consumption». Franco Pomilio, CEO of Pomilio Blumm, agency specialised precisely on public communication, echoed his reflections and recalled: «Institutions must aim at simplicity, at a type of storytelling realised following specific humanistic and semantic rules, able to reach different cultures and contribute to creating a sense of community, identity and shared European citizenship».