Nov
29

Marketing Myopia in a Climate Changing World

Fifty years ago, Theodore Levitt published a seminal article in the Harvard Business Review. Titled “Marketing Myopia” it challenged the business paradigm of the day by asking readers to think of industry as a customer-satisfying process, not a goods-producing process: “an industry” said Levitt “begins with the customer and his needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill”.Those who grasped this concept and made the customer king could create organisations capable of capitalising on growth opportunities while those who focused merely on operational efficiency or the power of a patent, would eventually find their customers would wander off as others tempted them with newer, better alternate ways to have their needs filled. The key was to view the business organisation not as an entity that produced a good or se candida treatment rvice that needed to be sold to recalcitrant customers but rather to seek to do the things that would make customers want to do business with it. This would make the objective of business not be about mere survival but to “survive gallantly, to feel the surging impulse of commercial mastery; not just to experience the sweet smell of success, but to have the visceral feel of entrepreneurial greatness”. No wonder CEOs across the world were soon asking themselves the key question of “what business am I in?”Today, the world is facing a new challenge to the business paradigm. It is now clear that the way we conduct business throughout the world is having an adverse effect on the natural environment and that the scale of that impact is not only growing but is on course to threaten the basis of industrial civilisation as we know it.

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