Marketing myopiaTheodore Levitt
Marketing myopia
by Theodore Levitt · first published 2008
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I highly recommend you read the paper Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt (1960).
on “Reflecting on 18 Years at Google” ↗The argument being made is really Levitt's marketing myopia argument which at least used to appear in pretty much every Marketing 101 course. [1] The argument is that you should define yourself as a transportation company rather than a railroad (or an energy company…
on “Big Oil Companies Should Adopt a Self-Liquidation Strategy” ↗The original reference is probably Levitt's "Marketing Myopia" (https://books.google.com/books?id=Zn4foOUm3AoC). Levitt uses it to illustrate that companies should focus on customers rather than products.
on “Neeva (search engine with a privacy and AI focus) is shutting down” ↗In his 1960 essay Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt argued that companies don’t fail because markets saturate — they fail because leaders define themselves around products instead of customers. 60+ years later, the AI hype cycle looks…
Certainly Kodak did a lot of things wrong but there's a common meme straight out of Marketing Myopia [1] that, had they only thought of themselves as a photography company rather than a film company, all would have been well. This is basically nonsense. Even had Kodak been more aggressive about cannibalizing…
on “Ask HN: Insider history of the demise of Kodak?” ↗