Marketing Myopia Revisited

I was sad to hear about the death last Wednesday of Theodore Levitt. Levitt was a noted author, Harvard scholar and a former editor of the Harvard Business Review (HBR). Many consider his famous essay, Marketing Myopia, and his book, Marketing Imagination, to be seminal works in raising the awareness and importance of marketing in modern business. I recently re-read Marketing Myopia and it seems, in many ways, to be just as relevant now as it was when it was first published in HBR decades ago.

The main point of Marketing Myopia: organizations were missing huge growth opportunities because many failed to see the true nature of their businesses and the relationship of those businesses to the marketplace. Once organizations realized the shortsightedness of their perspective, they were able to redefine their missions and capitalize with more effective management and marketing.

A different kind of Marketing Myopia exists today. The world has changed. Customers are in control. Many in the media and advertising seem to be blinded to the fundamental changes this has created for anybody in the communication business. There are new tools and new ways of doing things that can no longer be ignored without peril to the enterprise.

A change in thinking is difficult to accept. It requires tinkering with the very building blocks of the present operational paradigm. It requires hitting the reset button on the brain. What if some of the knowledge that resides in the gray matter is lost? That could be a good thing, because it will help clear the myopia that has been induced by “the way things have always been done,” and instead create a tabula rasa to see the scores of new opportunities created by new media, new methodologies and a new marketing reality.

Books and essays may grow old, but good advice is much more resilient. Thank you Mr. Levitt for your sage observations over many decades. Your contributions and fresh perspectives were assimilated by millions of people in business including this appreciative reader. Hopefully, your words will live on and continue to help a new generation of marketers develop their own visual acuity with respect to the world around them.