Marketing Mayopia

MARKETING MYOPIA

Theodore Levitt

Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of

growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Other which are thought of as

seasoned growth industries have stopped growing. In every case the reason growth is threatened,

slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of

management.

FATEFUL PURPOSE

The failure is at the top. The executives responsible for it, in the last analysis, are those who deal

with broad aims and policies. Thus:

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 the need was filled by others

(cars, trucks, airplanes, 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 wrong was because they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented;

they were product-oriented instead of customer-oriented.

Hollywood barely escaped being totally ravished by television. Actually, all the established film

companies went through drastic reorganizations. Some simply disappeared. All of them got into

trouble not because of TV’s inroads but because of their own myopia. As with the railroads,

Hollywood defined its business incorrectly. It thought it was in the movie business when it was

actually in the entertainment business. “Movies” implied a specific, limited product. This

produced a fatuous contentment, which from the beginning led producers to view TV as a threat.

Hollywood scorned and rejected TV when it should have welcomed it as an opportunity-an

opportunity to expand the entertainment business.

Today TV is a bigger business than the old narrowly defined movie...