Sreelakshmi Surendran

Bus 103 section (026)

April 11, 2021

Levitt, Theodore. (1960) Marketing Myopia. Harvard Business Review,138-149

Intro

Marketing in simple terms is Strategy. Strategy is the discipline, practice, and philosophy of creating an analytical
plan that creates results. Marketing helps to promote and sell the products and services of a company. Marketing is
about creating, communicating, and delivering offers to customers to fulfill their needs, the ultimate goal is to create
value for consumers, for the company, and its stakeholders.

Thesis

According to an article by Theodore Levitt in Harvard Business Review, Marketing Myopia is an approach to
marketing that focuses on fulfillment of immediate needs of the company rather than focusing on marketing from
consumers’ point of view. To put it another way, marketing myopia is a company’s strategy that adopts a
narrow-minded marketing approach and fails to fulfill the requirements of the consumers. In this situation,
companies primary focus is on its sales and profits and ignores the changing needs and requirements of its
customers. The whole purpose of a marketing strategy is to create customers, however, through marketing myopia
companies are bound to lose their customers.

The main idea of the article is that Companies stop growing because of a failure in management, not because the
market is saturated but because of Myopia. Marketing myopia focuses more on the needs of the seller, it is
preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash, while a good marketing strategy would focus on
the needs of the customers and satisfies the needs using the product and the whole cluster of things associated with
creating, delivering, and consuming it. One example stated in the article is about how railroads declined because
they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented. Railroads did not decline because of cars, trucks, or
airplanes, they declined because of their myopia.

Central Pillars

Theodore Levitt in his article “Marketing Myopia” compels readers to understand that there is no such thing as
“Growth Industry”, he believes that there are only companies that organize and operate to create and capitalize on
growth opportunities. According to Levitt, the growth industry is a self-deceiving cycle and there are four conditions
that guarantee this cycle:

1. The belief that growth is assured by an expanding and more affluent population: A myth believed by most
industries, when the market for a product is growing the company stops thinking about the future assuming
that the growing market will bring success. The company’s focus then shifts from fulfilling the customer’s
needs to expanding their production and selling which leads to the company’s downfall.
2. The belief that there is no competitive substitute for the industry’s major product: Another belief that could
bring a downfall for any company. When the company has too much faith that their products are
indispensable, they stop thinking about the future. They are focused on creating more of their product rather
than considering the changing environment.
3. Too much faith in mass production and in the advantages of rapidly declining unit costs as output rises:
Companies focus on production and cost rather than customer preference when unit cost declines. Once
they have their products mass-produced they are focused on selling them rather than marketing them.
4. Preoccupation with a product that lends itself to carefully controlled scientific experimentation,
improvement, and manufacturing cost reduction: another danger companies face is when top management
is wholly transfixed by the profit possibilities of technical research and development. An example would be
the technology firms that tend to focus their efforts on scientific implementations and research which raises
their costs. This can increase the chance of failure if the new developments are not accepted by the
consumers.

Discussion
From the article “Marketing Myopia” we can understand that building a customer-oriented company requires more
than just quality products. Any company that wants to grow needs to understand the changing trends, technologies,
and most importantly consumer preference. Theodore Levitt provides a clear explanation as to why organizations
need a clearly defined purpose and customer value. A company must know to not consider itself as producing goods
and services but as buying customers. Through the article, Levitt tells us that if the top management of an
organization fails to see the local and global implications of changing trends and keeps focusing on products, they
are bound to get caught in the self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay. To survive in a
competitive environment, companies have to constantly evolve and innovate. The main functions of a company
should be customer satisfaction, delivering, selling, production, and research and development.