The Importance of Marketing

In our lecture we looked at marketing strategy and how marketing must be seen from the customers view point. Levitt reiterates this point further by stressing the importance of marketing being customer focused and not product focused and looks at the four conditions or beliefs that a Company can hold which can ultimately lead to its collapse. These conditions being, the idea that profit is assured by an affluent population, the belief that there are no equal competitors, too much faith in mass production and preoccupation with technical research and development. By Companies focusing on any one of these four conditions they fail to look at what the customer actually wants. As Levitt notes as “Industry is a customer-satisfying process, and not a goods-producing process” you must begin with what the customer wants, then work backwards, to how to deliver what the customer wants, and then to, how to create what the customer wants.  

Levitt, T. (1960) Marketing Myopia. Harvard Business Review, July-August, 45-56