Marketing Myopia

As students interested in the field of Accounting it is sometimes easy to downplay the role of other fields and their importance to a businesses success. Marketing plays an integral part to any businesses success because without it the consumer would never want or get the product being produced by the business. As accountants we tend to take a more black and white or X and O approach to Marketing but Levitt stresses there is more to it than meets the eye. A key concept we discussed in class was Marketing Myopia. Marketing Myopia is considered the most influential Marketing idea of the past half-century and is based on the idea that businesses will ultimately do better in the end if they concentrate on meeting customers' needs rather than selling the product.

To illustrate the importance of his idea Levitt provides several examples of industries that experienced this tunnel vision and shortsightedness which ultimately led to lower profitability and sometimes consolidation. Some industry examples provided are dry cleaning, grocery stores, and the railroads. Levitt stresses that businesses should understand the benefit they are ultimately providing to consumers. He would suggest that these businesses lost sight of the benefit provided to consumers and became obsolete because of it.

Levitt also stresses that Marketing is different than Selling. My previous assumption was that Marketing and Selling were one in the same but it is easy to see now that they are clearly in separate circles. Marketing, according to Levitt, addresses the customers needs while Selling is simply the process of persuading the consumer to buy a product. We analyzed Marketing Myopia previously in M370 but as we have discussed before there is always more learning to be done because "you can learn Marketing in a day but it takes a lifetime to master."