Marketing Myopia - Full Concept & Presentation

Marketing Myopia is a term used I marketing as well as the title of a important marketing paper written by Theodore Levitt. This paper was first published in 1960 in the Harvard Business Review, a journal of which he was an editor.

He makes a point that most business fail to identify what their customers are buying. They are entirely focusing on the product & Service and not on benefits & the end result.

Professor Levitt has explained marketing myopia as a colored and crooked perception of marketing and a sort sightness about business. Excessive attention to production, product or selling aspect at the cost of customer and his actual need, creates this myopia. It leads to wrong and inadequate understanding of market and hence failure in market place.

Oil Companies sell energy, not oil. Cinema sell Entertainment, not film. Rail Companies sell travel, not rail tickets.

People don’t really want a quarter-inch drill, said Levitt, what they really want is a quarter inch hole.

The Myopia is even leads to a wrong or inadequate understanding of the very nature of business in which given organization is engaged and thereby affect the future of business. He further explained that while business keep changing with the time, there is some fundamental characteristics in each business that maintain itself through the changing of time which relates to human needs. Those products which could not change were sooner replaced by other innovation which satisfies the customer expectations and need.

Example – Earlier tape recorder of Sony was most popular but sooner they replaced by iPod. Everyone know about Kotak cameras which uses real technology has been replaced by Sony digital camera and then other companies follow the trend to survival.

So in Sort we can say that – Myopia is sort sighted and inward looking approach to marketing that focus on the need of firm instead of defining the firm and its product in term of need & wants.

Railroads serves as an example of an industry whose failure occurred due to a limited market view. Those behind the rail roads are in trouble not because the need of passenger transportation has decline or even because that need is filled by cars, airplanes or other mode of transportation, rather the industry is failing because of those behind it assumed that they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business. They were rail road oriented instead of transportation oriented, product oriented instead of customer oriented.