Mkt Mypia

Marketing Myopia
Theodore Levitt
Reprinted by permission of the publishers from Edward C. Bursk and John F.
Chapman, eds., Modern Marketing Strategy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, @ 1964), by the President and Fellows of Harvard College; originally
published in the Harvard Business Review, 38 (July-August 1960), pp. 24-47. The
retrospective commentary was published in theHarvard Business Review, 53
(September-October 1975), copyright @ by the President and Fellows of Harvard
College; all rights reserved.
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, which
are thought of as seasoned growth industries, have actually stopped growing. In
every case the reasongrowth 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 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 wasbecause 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 withthe 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 opportunityto expand the
entertainment business.
Today TV is a bigger business than the old narrowly defined movie business ever was. Had
Hollywood been customer-oriented (providing entertainment), rather than product-oriented
(making movies), would it have gone through the fiscal purgatory that it did? I doubt
it. What ultimately saved Hollywood and accounted for its recent resurgence was the wave
ofnew young writers, producers, and directors whose previous successes in television
had decimated the old movie companies and toppled the big movie moguls.

There are other less obvious examples of industries that have been and are now
endangering their futures by improperly defining their purposes. I shall
discuss some in detail later and analyze the kind of policies that lead to
trouble.Right now it may help to show what a thoroughly customer-oriented
management can do to keep a growth industry growing, even after the obvious
opportunities have been exhausted; and here there are two examples that have

been around for a long time. They are nylon and glass-specifically, E. I.
duPonts de Nemours 8c Company and Corning Glass Works:
Both companies have great technicalcompetence. Their product orientation is
unquestioned. But this alone does not explain their success. After all, who was
more prideful product-oriented and product-conscious than the erstwhile New
England textile companies that have been so thoroughly massacred? The duPonts
and the Comings have succeeded not primarily because of their product or
research orientation but because they have been...