What business is your company really in? That's a question all executives should all ask before demand for their firm's products or services dwindles. In Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt offers examples of companies that became obsolete because they misunderstood what business they were in and thus what their customers wanted. He identifies the four widespread myths that put companies at risk of obsolescence and explains how business leaders can shift their attention to customers' real needs instead.
NEW from the bestselling HBR’s 10 Must Reads series. Stop pushing products—and start cultivating relationships with the right customers. If you read nothing else on marketing that delivers competitive advantage, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you reinvent your marketing by putting it—and your customers—at the center of your business. Leading experts such as Ted Levitt and Clayton Christensen provide the insights and advice you need to: • Figure out what business you’re really in • Create products that perform the jobs people need to get done • Get a bird’s-eye view of your brand’s strengths and weaknesses • Tap a market that’s larger than China and India combined • Deliver superior value to your B2B customers • End the war between sales and marketing Looking for more Must Read articles from Harvard Business Review? Check out these titles in the popular series: HBR’s 10 Must Reads: The Essentials HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Communication HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Collaboration HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Innovation HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Leadership HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Making Smart Decisions HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Managing Yourself HBR’s 10 Must Reads on Teams
Theodore Levitt’s 1960 article “Marketing Myopia” is a business classic that earned its author the nickname “the father of modern marketing”. It is also a beautiful demonstration of the problem solving skills that are crucial in so many areas of life – in business and beyond. The problem facing Levitt was the same problem that has confronted business after business for hundreds of years: how best to deal with slowing growth and eventual decline. Levitt studied many business empires – the railroads, for instance – that at a certain point simply shrivelled up and shrank to almost nothing. How, he asked, could businesses avoid such failures? His approach and his solution comprise a concise demonstration of high-level problem solving at its best. Good problem solvers first identify what the problem is, then isolate the best methodology for solving it. And, as Levitt showed, a dose of creative thinking also helps. Levitt’s insight was that falling sales are all about marketing, and marketing is about knowing your real business. The railroads misunderstood their real market: they weren’t selling rail, they were selling transport. If they had understood that, they could have successfully taken advantage of new growth areas – truck haulage, for instance – rather than futilely scrabbling to sell rail to a saturated market.
A unique approach to the marketing/ management concept discusses product and marketing objectives, the relationship between client and supplier, the industrialization of service, and other facets of effective marketing strategies.
This book investigates the phenomenon of strategic myopia, which refers to important cognitive distortions that managers systematically display. It captures narrow views and preferences, which are likely to hurt firms’ long-term prospects. Instead of accusing managers of imperfections, opportunism, or blindness, this book explains how strategic myopia stems from individual dispositions, how it is shaped by team contingencies, and encouraged by organizations’ design. The reader will learn how a metaphor introduced to explain business failure evolved over decades to become a concept useful in understanding intertemporal choices, technology substitution, competitive advantage erosion, competitive blindspots, and missed opportunities. In addition to explaining the mechanisms that encourage myopic behaviors, readers are offered a set of effective ways to address strategic myopia. A key benefit of this work is that the structure of the book allows the use of chapters separately. The core message is that eliminating strategic myopia is hardly possible, and may actually hurt the firms’ short-term efficiency. However, organizations may develop capabilities, and implement designs that favor balancing the short-term benefits of myopia and alleviate its long-term drawbacks. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers, advanced students and experienced managers in the fields of strategic management and organizational behavior.
This book proposes that, within the automotive industry, revised marketing principles and innovative marketing strategies are needed to address more effectively the unprecedented challenges posed by the modern digital revolution. The starting point for these proposals is a thorough analysis of the evolution of marketing in the industry across three ages of technological innovations – the mechanical, the electronic, and the digital. The main objectives are first, to illustrate how study of the past can help carmakers as they move forward into the unknown, and second, to identify the main choices that they will face. The central premise is that unusual times call for unusual strategies. By mining the past in order to foresee likely future developments regarding competition and marketing strategies within the car industry, the book will appeal both to researchers and to present or future managers in the automotive and other innovation-driven sectors.
Stop pushing products—and start cultivating relationships with the right customers. If you read nothing else on marketing that delivers competitive advantage, read these 10 articles. We’ve combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you reinvent your marketing by putting it—and your customers—at the center of your business. Leading experts such as Ted Levitt and Clayton Christensen provide the insights and advice you need to: Figure out what business you’re really in Create products that perform the jobs people need to get done Get a bird’s-eye view of your brand’s strengths and weaknesses Tap a market that’s larger than China and India combined Deliver superior value to your B2B customers End the war between sales and marketing
The 4A framework helps companies create value for customers by identifying exactly what they want and need, as well as by uncovering new wants and needs. (For example, none of us knew we "needed" an iPad until Apple created it.) That means not only ensuring that customers are aware of the product, but also ensuring that the product is affordable, accessible and acceptable to them.
