Miopia em marketing

BEST i960 We always know when an HBR article hits the big time. Journalists write about it, pundits talk about it, executives routecopiesof it around the organization, and its vocabulary becomes familiar to managers everywhere -sometimes to the point where they don't even associate the words with the original article. Most important, of course, managers change how they do business because the ideas in the piece helped them see issues in a new light. "Marketing Myopia" is the quintessential big hit HBR piece. In it,Theodore Levitt, who was then a lecturer in business administration at the Harvard Business School, introduced the famous question,"What business are you really in?" and with ittheclaim that, had railroad executives seen themselves as being in the transportation business rather than the railroad business, they would have continued to grow. The article is as much about strategy as it is about marketing, but it also introduced the most influential marketing idea of the past halfcentury: that businesses wilt do better in the end if they concentrate on meeting customers'needs rather than on selling products. "Marketing Myopia" won the McKinsey Award in i960.

Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt

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Sustained growth depends on how broadly you define your business-and how carefully you gauge your customers'needs.

VERY MAJOR INDUSTRY WaS

a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others that are thought of as seasoned growth industries have actually stopped growing. In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.

Fateful Purposes
The failure is at the top. The executives responsible for it, in the last analysis, are those who deal with broad aims and policies. Thus: • The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and 138

freight