Every once in a corporate blue moon a truly revolutionary idea comes along, one that makes every thinking company look at what it is doing through a new pair of spectacles. And a vision corrective was exactly what Theodore Levitt offered managers with his scornful, provocative and hugely influential Marketing Myopia, when it appeared in the Harvard Business Review in 1960. Its subject may have been marketing but, as much as anything, it was about strategy.
There is surely not a business in the developed world that doesn’t ‘focus on the customer’, or at least claim to. So it may be hard to remember, or conceive of, a time when that simply wasn’t so. Well, it’s how it was at the start of the 1960s, when Levitt chose to shake US industry by the scruff of its collective neck. He began by pointing out that every major industry was once a growth industry. Some still were, but had the spectre of decline looming over them. Others had already stopped growing. In either case, the reason was not market saturation but a failure of management, right at the top. His Exhibit A is worth quoting in full:
“The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes, and even telephones) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry incorrectly was that they were railroad oriented instead of transportation oriented; they were product oriented instead of customer oriented.”
