Ted Levitt on Marketing

Ted Levitt (Harvard) himself has described his article Marketing myopia as a manifesto. It challenged the conventional thinking of the time by putting forward a persuasive case for the importance of the marketing approach and the shortsightedness short·sight·ed·ness.

In an era in which post-war shortages contributed to a concentration on production, most companies had developed a product orientation which Levitt believed was too narrow a philosophy to allow continued business success. A drive to increase the efficiency and volume of production took place at the expense of monitoring whether the company was actually producing what the customer wanted. Marketing myopia stressed that customer wants and desires should be a central consideration of any business.

"The organisation must learn to think of itself not as producing goods or services but as buying customers, as doing the things that will make people want to do business with it." (Marketing myopia) In order to achieve this,

"... the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer satisfying organism. Management must think of itself not as providing products but as providing customer-creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea (and everything it means and requires) into every nook and cranny.