Marketing Myopia

Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt

I. The author central thesis :

Marketing Myopia is extracted from the Harvard business review published in 1960 and written by Theodore Lewitt who was an American economist and lecturer in business administration at the Harvard University.

Theodore Levitt chose the title Myopia in order to explain us how most of the companies worked out. They don’t think in term of future but in term of profits.

The main idea of the article is that companies are not customers oriented but product oriented and this is a big problem for their growth.

Thanks to different examples the author explain us the importance for a company to project themselves in the future, he told us that most of the companies stay focus on the present and on what they want but not on the customer’s needs.

A lot of these companies own their market that means that they don’t think about their potential competitors so they don’t try to improve their product.

They are focus on mass production and, of course, maximum benefits for them.

At the beginning an industry is often growing but the key to keep a company or an industry growing is to set up a customer oriented management. You always have to anticipate the customer’s needs because nowadays with technology for example; it’s easy to be overtaken by someone else and if you are not ready it can be the death of your company.

II. The three key lessons:

These are for me the three key lessons of this article:

- Don’t think of producing products but of creating a satisfaction value for the customer.

If you think only of the production and your benefit your company is not going to grow but it’s going to stay at the same place. It’s necessary to adapt quickly and answering as good as possible to the expectations of the customers.

- The importance for a chief executive to know his direction:

It’s very important for a company to have goals, to know what way they have to take in order to success. Focus on the goals of the company and giving the best you can.

- The importance of the adaptation :

Nowadays you need to adapt to the market and you have to do it quickly because if you don’t your competitors will do. Sometimes it’s hard to survive so you really have to know the market and his expectations.

III. Critical review:

This article was written in 1960 and it was really well adapted because I think that during the sixties the approach of marketing was not significant or maybe non-existent.

That is why most of the companies were product oriented because they didn’t have a marketing approach because they wanted to make benefits now.

They didn’t want to hold on and work on the customer needs, for example companies didn’t spend a lot of time for the loyalty program compare to nowadays.

But now I think this article is a little bit obsolete, because thanks to a lot of great men and studies about the customer’s mind all companies know how to attract them and satisfy

...