Critique on Marketing Myopia | Submitted by: Husnain Moazzam | Submitted by: Sir Hassan |

Critique on Marketing Myopia
Theodore Levitt was a lecturer in Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; now, he is a full-fledged professor. The Harvard Business Review has sold more than half a million reprints of this article and each reprint has no doubt been copied several times over.
There will be few marketing students who have not read this article which is about how an organization can guarantee its sustained growth a big question?
To quote from the summing up of this article, Marketing Myopia answered that question mark in a new demanding way by urging organizations to define their business broadly to take privilege of development opportunities.
Using the example of the railroads, Levitt showed how they declined as technology highly developed since they define themselves too narrowly. To continue growing, companies must ascertain and act on their customers' needs and desires, and not bank on the presumptive longevity of their products.
Even more dramatic is the first paragraph of this seminal article which reads: “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 reason for growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated; it is because there has been a failure of management”.
Well I am with Levitt, those companies who have not defined there business or had defined it too thin Marketing myopia is true, including companies in Pakistan and India, who have redefine their business in the '60s and '70s on the basis of licensing production.
There are different examples when an organization has redefined its marketplace; it has persistent growth as new objectives are set i.e. Internet, Telephones, wireless communication, cable television service providers, Television
The same is true of brands. Organizations which division a market using their strategies and do not think of the purchaser of the product or service such type of organization will result in marketing myopia. The effect in the brand not being able to take advantage of its full opportunity and even prevent the brand from fast open a whole new market. Example:
It was myopia which prohibited some of the leading organizations i.e. Hindustan Lever and Tata to make a bar for washing clothes but people used it as detergent bar so they removed a chemical that they have added so that color of the clothes should not be damaged and save money. Well this was good strategy.
After Levitt article companies change there thinking about customer, at the time companies just made product or service according to customer willingness. Mass production operations have been transformed. * Executives has stretched out product lines and diverse there business i.e. take the example of Pepsi international. * Research and development is the sustainability of the business. However, what you are researching and developing in the company is really the sustainability of the business. Levitt describes research and development teams in companies today that just focus on new technological advances, such as increasing productivity or using new raw materials that will allow the same product to be made at a cheaper cost, as dangerous because the end users are not being considered. * George Steiner (1979) claims that if a buggy whip manufacturer in 1910 defined its business as the transportation starter business, they might have been able to make the creative leap necessary to move into the automobile business when technological change demanded it. * Netflix rapidly took over the movie delivery industry by focus on what their customers be essentially demanding, then they had made a strategy for consumers to enjoy this amazing experience by bring it directly to their home
References:

http://bizshifts-trends.com/2010/12/14/myopic-madness/ http://kschondo.blogspot.com/2012/01/marketing-myopia.html http://hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia/ www.adsaint.com/?p=9720 http://b2bmarketingdirections.blogspot.com/09y-marketing/myopia/is-still-problem.html