Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Marketing Myopia
by Theodore Levitt
very major industry was once a growth indus- because of their own myopia. As with the rail-
try. But some that are now riding a wave of roads, Hollywood defined its business incor-
growth enthusiasm are very much in the rectly. It thought it was in the movie business
shadow of decline. Others which are thought of as when it was actually in the entertainment busi-
seasoned growth industries have actually stopped ness. "Movies" implied a specific, limited prod-
growing. In every case the reason growth is threat- uct. This produced a fatuous contentment which
ened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is
__ __
saturated. It is because there has been a failure of How can a company ensure its continuedgrowth! In 1960,
management. "MarketingMyopia" answered that question in a new and
Fateful purposes. The failure is at the top. The challenging way by urging organizations to define their
executives responsible for it, in the last analysis, are industries broadly to take advantage of growth opportuni-
those who deal with broad aims and policies. Thus: ties. Using the archetype of the railroads, Mr. Levitt
showed how they declined inevitably as technology ad-
The railroads did not stop growing because the vanced because they defined themselves too narrowly. 'Ib
continue growing, companies must ascertain and act on
need for passenger and freight transportation
their customers' needs and desires, not bank on the pre-
declined. That grew. The railroads are in trouble sumptive longevity of their products. The success of the
today not because the need was filled by others article testifies to the validity of its message. It has been
(cars,trucks, airplanes, even telephones)but be- widely quoted and anthologized, and HBR has sold more
cause it was not filled by the railroads them- than 265.000 reprints of it. The author of 14 subsequent
selves. They let others take customers away articles in HBR, Mr. Levitt is one of the magazine's most
from them because they assumed themselves to prolific contributors. In a retrospective commentary, he
be in the railroad business rather than in the considers the use and misuse that have been made of
transportation business. The reason they de- "Marketing Myopia, describing its many interpretations
fined their industry incorrectly was that they and hypothesizing about its success.
were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-
oriented; they were product-oriented instead of At the time of the article's publication, Theodore Levitt
was lecnuer in business administration at the Harvard
customer-oriented. Business School. Now a fuU professor there. he is the
' Houvoodbarely escaped being ravished author of six books, The Third Sector: New
by television- Actually, all the established film Tactics for a Responsive Society (1973) and Marketing for
companies went through drastic reorgaka- Business Growth (2974).His most recent article for HBR
tions. Some simply disappeared. All of them got was "Dinosaursamong the Bears and Bulls" (lanuary-Feb-
into trouble not because of TV's inroads but ruary1975).
Copyright 0 1975 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
from the beginning led producers to view TV as and movies? This view commits precisely the error I
a threat. Hollywood scorned and rejected TV have been talking about. It defines an industry, or a
when it should have welcomed it as an opportu- product, or a cluster of know-how so narrowly as to
nity-an opportunity to expand the entertain- guarantee its premature senescence. When we men-
ment business. tion railroads, we should make sure we mean
transportation. As transporters, the railroads still
Today T V is a bigger business than the old narrowly
have a good chance for very considerable growth.
defined movie business ever was. Had Hollywood
They are not limited to the railroad business as such
been customer-oriented (providing entertainment)
(though in my opinion rail transportation is poten-
rather than product-oriented (makingmovies),would
tially a much stronger transportation medium than
it have gone through the fiscal purgatory that it did?
is generally believed).
I doubt it. What ultimately saved Hollywood and
What the railroads lack is not opportunity but
accounted for its resurgence was the wave of new some of the managerial imaginativenessand audacity
young writers, producers, and directors whose pre- that made them great. Even an amateur like Jacques
vious successes in television had decimated the old
Barzun can see what is lacking when he says:
movie companies and toppled the big movie moguls.
There are other less obvious examples of industries I grieve to see the most advanced physical and
that have been and are now endangeringtheir futures social organization of the last century go down
by improperly defining their purposes. I shall discuss in shabby disgrace for lack of the same compre-
some in detail later and analyze the kind of policies hensive imagination that built it up. [What is
that lead to trouble. Right now it may help to show lacking is] the will of the companies to survive
what a thoroughly customer-oriented management and to satisfy the public by inventiveness and
can do to keep a growth industry growing, even after Skill.
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-specifi- SHADOW OF OBSOLESCENCE
cally, E. I. DuPont de Nemours & Company and
Coming Glass Works. It is impossible to mention a single major industry
Both companies have great technical competence. that did not at one time qualify for the magic appel-
Their product orientation is unquestioned. But this lation of growth industry. In each case its assumed
alone does not explain their success. After all, who strength lay in the apparently unchallenged supe-
was more pridefully product-oriented and product- riority of its product. There appeared to be no effec-
conscious than the erstwhile New England textile tive substitute for it. It was itself a runaway substi-
companies that have been so thoroughly massacred? tute for the product it so triumphantly replaced. Yet
The DuPonts and the Comings have succeeded not one after another of these celebrated indusmes has
primarily because of their product or research orien- come under a shadow..Let us look briefly at a few
tation but because they have been thoroughly cus- more of them, this time taking examples that have
tomer-oriented also. It is constant watchfulness for so far received a little less attention:
opportunities to apply their technical know-how to Dry cleaning. This was once a growth industry
the creation of customer-satisfymg uses which ac- with lavish prospects. In an age of wool garments,
counts for their prodigious output of successful new imagine being finally able to get them safely and
products. Without a very sophisticated eye on the easily clean. The boom was on.
customer, most of their new products might have Yet here we are 30 years after the boom started, and
been wrong, their sales methods useless. the industry is in trouble. Where has the competition
Aluminum has also continued to be a growth in- come from? From a better way of cleaning?No. It has
dustry, thanks to the efforts of two wartime-created come from synthetic fibers and chemical additives
companies which deliberately set about creating new that have cut the need for dry cleaning. But this is
customer-satisfymguses. Without Kaiser Aluminum only the beginning. Lurking in the wings and ready
& Chemical Corporation and Reynolds Metals Com-
to make chemical dry cleaning totally obsolescent is
pany, the total demand for aluminum today would be that powerful magician, ultrasonics.
vastly less. Electric utilities. This is another one of those sup-
Error of analysis. Some may argue that it is foolish posedly no-substitute products that has been en-
to set the railroads off against aluminum or the mov- throned on a pedestal of invincible growth. When the
ies off against glass, Are not aluminum and glass
incandescent lamp came along, kerosene lights were
naturally so versatile that the industries are bound to finished. Later the water wheel and the steam engine
have more growth opportunities than the railroads were cut to ribbons by the flexibility, reliability,
.
9 In the Search for Oil
In Production Operations
out, selling concerns itself with the tricks and tech-
niques of getting people to exchange their cash for
. complex operations.
Marketing staffs have suddenly and rapidly ex-
panded themselves and their research budgets
than restrained and balanced explanations, no matter
who the audience? Is it that the character of the
message is as much the message as its content? Or
without either getting sufficient prior organiza- was mine not simply a different tune but a new
tional support or, thereafter, producing suffi- symphony? I dont know.
. cient results.
Companies that are functionally organized have
converted to product-, brand-, or market-based
Of course, Id do it again and in the same way, given
my purposes, even with what more I now know-the
good and the bad, the power of facts, and the limits
organizations with the expectation of instant of rhetoric. If your mission is the moon, you dont use
and miraculous results. The outcome has been a car.Don Marquiss cockroach, Archy, provides some
ambiguity, frustration, confusion, corporate in- final consolation: Anidea is not responsible for who
fighting, losses, and finally a reversion to func- believes in it.
tional arrangements that has only worsened the
. situation.
Companies have attempted to serve custom-
ers by creating complex and beautifully efficient
1. Jacques Barzun, Trains and the Mind of Man, Holiday,
February 1960, p. 21.
2. For more details see M. M. z i m m m , 7he Super Market:
A Revolution in Dismbution (New York McGraw-Hill Book
products or services that buyers are either too Company, Inc., 1955),p. 48.
risk-averse to adopt or incapable of learning how 3. hid., pp. 45-47.
to employ-in effect, there are now steam shov- 4. 7he Affluent Society (Boston:Houghton Mifnin Company,
els for people who havent yet learned to use 1958),p ~ 152-160.
.
5. Henxy Ford, My Life and Work (New York Doubleday, Page
spades. This problem has happened repeatedly &Company, 19231, pp. 146-147.
in the so-called service industries (financialserv- 6. Jacques Barzun, l h i n s and the Mind of Man, Holiday,
ices, insurance, computer-based services) and February 1960, p. 20.
with American companies selling in less-devel-
oped economies.