Marketing: An Introduction
Marketing: An Introduction
The classic first course in marketing — now with a full new chapter on generative AI, refreshed Canadian cases, and the customer-value foundation instructors have trusted for decades.
Why this edition
For a generation of students, Marketing: An Introduction has been the book that made marketing make sense. It takes a subject that can feel like a pile of buzzwords and organizes it around one durable idea: customer value and customer engagement drive every good marketing strategy. Get that right, and everything else — segmentation, branding, pricing, channels, communication — has somewhere to hang.
That idea hasn't changed. What surrounds it has. Since the Eighth Edition, generative AI has moved from novelty to daily tool, reshaping how marketers research customers, create content, buy media, and measure what works. Students entering the field today are expected to understand it on day one.
The Ninth Canadian Edition keeps the foundation instructors trust and adds a full, dedicated chapter on generative AI and large language models, alongside refreshed cases and data, so first-year students learn the fundamentals and the tools now reshaping the profession.
What it's built on
Four ideas run through the whole book.
Customer value and engagement
The through-line of the whole book. Every concept connects back to creating value for customers and building relationships that last — the framework students carry into every course and job that follows.
Written for your very first marketing course
No assumed background, no jargon dropped without explanation. A clear path from “what is marketing?” to a working understanding of how real companies compete.
Canadian to the core
Canadian companies, Canadian consumer data, and Canadian context — not U.S. examples with the spelling changed. Students see themselves and the market they'll actually work in.
Current with a field in motion
A new chapter on generative AI, plus updated coverage of search, social, mobile, and analytics — teaching the fundamentals and how they play out in a landscape defined by rapid change.
What's new in the Ninth Edition
A brand-new chapter: Generative AI and Large Language Models in Marketing
The headline addition. A full chapter that takes students from how large language models actually work to how to use them well — covering the rise of generative AI in marketing, how to evaluate the quality of AI-generated output, how LLMs support core marketing tasks, the ethical considerations and guardrails for responsible use, and the emerging trends shaping AI-driven marketing. Not a sidebar or a box — a complete, teachable chapter.
What's inside
Sixteen chapters, the complete first course, from fundamentals to the AI frontier. The book moves from what marketing is through how it's planned, built, priced, delivered, and communicated, and closes on the technology now reshaping all of it.
What makes it different
A trusted franchise, brought genuinely current.
→ Canadian, not adapted
Written for the Canadian market — Canadian companies, consumer data, and regulatory context, not a U.S. text with a maple leaf added.
→ Organized around engagement
Every chapter ties back to customer value and engagement, so students build one coherent way of thinking instead of memorizing disconnected topics.
→ AI, taught properly
A complete new chapter on generative AI and large language models — how they work, how to judge their output, and how to use them responsibly — so students graduate fluent in the tools the profession now runs on.
→ Trusted franchise, current thinking
The Armstrong and Kotler foundation that has taught marketing for decades, kept genuinely current — and supported by Pearson's instructor resources and MyLab, ready to adopt.
Who it's for
Written for the classroom, useful well beyond it.
Students
Anyone taking their first marketing course — in marketing, business, or communication programs — who wants the subject to actually click.
Instructors
A current, Canadian, teach-ready text with the supporting materials to run or refresh an introductory marketing course with confidence.
Newcomers to the field
Career-changers, small-business owners, and the marketing-curious who want a clear, trustworthy grounding in how modern marketing works.
About the author
Danielle Wilson
Danielle Wilson is a marketing and business-strategy educator with more than sixteen years in the post-secondary classroom. She is Program Head of the Digital Marketing and Brand Strategy program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology and an instructor and department coordinator in the School of Business at Capilano University in North Vancouver.
She is the Canadian co-author of Pearson's Marketing: An Introduction, joining the Armstrong–Kotler team to bring the text into the Canadian market. She is a past president of the BC chapter of the American Marketing Association and a recipient of Business in Vancouver's 40 Under 40 award. A 20-year veteran of the Canadian advertising-agency world, she continues to work as a digital marketing consultant. She holds a graduate degree from Harvard University and an undergraduate degree from Western University.