Article Critique: Theodore Levitt

Article Critique
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Question 1: Theodore Levitt
Theodore Levitt is an American economist who was born in 1925 and died in 2006. Levitt was born in Germany before his parents relocated to the United States in 1935. Additionally, Levitt became a serviceman in the Second World War, after which he acquired a high school diploma through a correspondence course. After service in the military, Levitt committed to an academic career and obtained a bachelor’s degree in Antioch College and a Ph.D. from Ohio State University. Moreover, Levitt helped develop marketing into its modern form, and he became a resident professor at Harvard (Business Thinkers, 2012). His paper, “Marketing Myopia,” helped in establishing Levitt as a doyen of marketing.
Question 2: What does Levitt criticize?
Levitt criticizes John Kenneth Galbraith’s opinion regarding advertising. According to Galbraith, the main objective of advertising is to create markets where the products created using technology can be sold. As the productive ability of a community increases through the help of modern technology, then it is used as a practical approach for creating the demand needed for the produced goods. This is considered as the artificial creation of wants. On the other side, Levitt determined advertising as an approach for meeting the wants that are already existing in a consumer.
Question 3: Marketing myopia
Ideally, Levitt suffers from marketing myopia when he fails to recognize ways through which the marketing he supports selling of consumption as a primary source of human meaning. It is important to note that although Levitt challenges Galbraith’s claim that the primary goal of advertising, he asserts that advertising help in telling the target individual about what they want in a given product.
Question 4: Levitt’s definition of marketing
Levitt views marketing as the process through which the marketer or seller focused not on promoting a given commodity but finds and meets the needs of the potential customer. In this case, it can be argued that the success of the marketing approach used is determined based on how the wants of the consumer are given the first priority. For instance, when marketing washing machines, the marketer would be required to ignore the features of the gadget (Grant, 1999). Instead, one would be keen on informing the target buyers about how the washing machine would help in reducing household burdens and save time for other activities such as spending more time with family.
Question 5: Dependence effect
According to Galbraith, the dependence effect is examined as the process of creating wants artificially. Galbraith maintains that in an opulent and wealthy society, advertising is considered as an effective approach for creating a market for the various products that are produced with the help of the available technologies (Grant, 1999). Additionally, since the production has increased, then demand should be generated for those goods. For example, example, technology has made it possible for companies to produce better and expensive smartphones; this requires companies to create artificial wants that did not exist previously so that phone enthusiasts can buy the ne...