Theodore Levitt

Theodore Levitt (1925-2006) wrote the founding text of customer-oriented marketing in Marketing Myopia. His diagnosis: industries do not die because the market disappears but because firms define their market too narrowly around the product instead of the need. The railroads thought they were in the train business rather than transportation. Levitt's lasting lesson is the question of which need you really serve, as an antidote to product infatuation. The lesson has a flip side the discipline learned later: a need definition can become so broad it excludes nothing. The usable market definition lies between myopia and hyperopia.

Key work Marketing Myopia (1960); The Marketing Imagination (1983)

Covered in