La Miopya En El Marketing

www.hbr.org

BEST OF HBR 1960
Sustained growth depends on
how broadly you define your
business—and how carefully
you gauge your customers’
needs.

Marketing Myopia
by Theodore Levitt
•

Reprint R0407L

Sustained growth depends on how broadly you define your business—
and how carefully you gauge your customers’ needs.

BEST OF HBR 1960

Marketing Myopia

COPYRIGHT © 2004HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

by Theodore Levitt

We always know when an HBR article hits the big
time. Journalists write about it, pundits talk
about it, executives route copies of it around the
organization, and its vocabulary becomes familiar to managers everywhere—sometimes to the
point where they don’t even associate the words
with the originalarticle. Most important, of
course, managers change how they do business
because the ideas in the piece helped them see
issues in a new light.
“Marketing Myopia” is the quintessential big
hit HBR piece. In it, Theodore Levitt, who was
then a lecturer in business administration at the
Harvard Business School, introduced the famous
question, “What business are you really in?” and
with it theclaim that, had railroad executives
seen themselves as being in the transportation
business rather than the railroad business, they
would have continued to grow. The article is as
much about strategy as it is about marketing, but
it also introduced the most influential marketing
idea of the past half-century: that businesses will
do better in the end if they concentrate on meeting customers’needs rather than on selling prod-

harvard business review • top-line growth • july–august 2004

ucts. “Marketing Myopia” won the McKinsey
Award in 1960.

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. Others that are thought of
as seasoned growth industries have actually
stoppedgrowing. 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 Purposes
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 andfreight 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 custom-

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M arketing Myopia •• •B E ST O F H BR 1960

Theodore Levitt, a longtime professor
of marketing at Harvard Business
School inBoston, is now professor
emeritus. His most recent books are
Thinking About Management (1990)
and The Marketing Imagination
(1983), both from Free Press.

ers 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 oftransportation 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 businessincorrectly. 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
that 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...