Marketing Myopia

Marketing Myopia presents Marketing is a much more involved way that the typical perception of the word. Many view marketing as an after the development stage process which Levitt would disagree with. Instead as I read through the article I quickly found that Levitt viewed Marketing as the beginning of any products life cycle. He did so by showing that without customer needs for a product, no sales will ever occur. Instead of making a new product, a firm should focus on the customer needs their product fulfills. This was somewhat backwards to me at first as I always considered Marketing to be the funny ads we see through various Media outlets. Levitt's view of Marketing turned my previous notions upside down in that Marketing is the egg that hatches the chicken. In other words based your business around a specific customer need, and then design your product to better address that need. 

Levitt additionally points out that industries that use to have promising growth potential became stagnant due to the notion that selling builds revenues rather than marketing. Selling according to Levitt is not the same as Marketing in that the latter addresses customer needs while the former merely attempts to persuade customers to exchange cash for your goods. Previously I assumed Marketing and Selling were one in the same, as effect marketing usually leads to effective selling. However, Levitt presents the two words as vastly different in both meaning and approach. 


Levitt also stresses that effective Marketing and examination of customer satisfaction are key to sustained growth in any industry, not merely using cheap gimmicks to increase your revenues. By addressing changes in customer needs, not only does your company develop a better value offering, but it also could lead to new opportunities for growth that mere selling may have blinded a firm from. By clearly establishing the needs of the customer in your industry, and matching those needs to the value offering of your product it seems that Levitt believes you well placed for large growth potential and on going innovation.