Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt, 1960

Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt, 1960 In his groundbreaking article ‘Marketing Myopia’ Theodore Levitt describes how industries and companies can drive themselves to death by focusing on the wrong priorities. Levitt famously described how the railroad business and the movie industry lost great opportunities by focusing on themselves rather than their clients. Railroad executives focused on the railroad business rather than viewing themselves as participants in the transportation business who should be serving passengers. Movie executives on the other hand viewed themselves as participants in an industry that churns out movies rather than producers of entertainment, mistakenly viewing the advent of the television in the 1970s as a threat to their business ratherthan an opportunity to build symbiotic relationships. In both examples we come across classic marketing myopia, where industry players adapt short sighted views and strategies that revolve around industry needs rather than customer satisfaction, creating a vacuum that competing industries quickly exploit. In essence Levitt points out that firms and industries stop growing due to management failures and shortsightedness rather than market saturation. Levitt gives further examples such as the dry-cleaning industry overtaken by the birth of synthetic textiles, electric utilities increasingly replaced by solar powered devices and grocery stores pushed to the periphery by supermarkets. In all these industries, the newer replacement always moves in to fill a gap that industry players deliberately refuse to fill. By providing and proving the assumptions that can destroy enti...