Page 250 - (DK) The Business Book

248 MARKETING MYOPIA

Shortsighted marketing focuses on
current customers and their needs but
overlooks potential new markets,
leading to missed opportunities and
more modest profits.

Farsighted marketing is adaptable,
allowing businesses to shift their focus
to reach a wider range of consumers
with a broader product offering. Returns
can then be much greater.

serious endeavor worthy of the first book to take a scholarly and Express to take up the position
management attention; instead scientific approach to marketing. of CEO at struggling car rental
it was a formulaic task left to the Kotler’s key teachings are that the company Avis. He rebuilt the
sales or production departments. customer should be at the center of business by focusing on two
But “Marketing Myopia” prompted any business, and that profit is interdependent principles: put
both the corporate and academic derived not merely from selling but customers first; and create a
worlds to start thinking differently. from delivering satisfaction to working environment in which
customers: thinking which is still at employees love what they do. For
Taking marketing seriously the core of most MBA programs. the first time the business began to
Around the same time that Levitt The effect of Levitt and Kotler’s make a profit.
was writing that pivotal article, he ideas on the corporate world was
inspired a student, Philip Kotler, almost immediate. In 1962, Customer service
who would take his proposition executive Robert Townsend had By 1964 Avis was expanding. The
further to cement a fundamental just been lured from American man appointed as manager of
change in the way managers operations in Europe, Africa, and
approached business. Kotler the Middle East, Colin Marshall,
studied at Harvard in 1960 for his was another believer in Levitt’s
postdoctoral work in mathematics, customer-centered approach, and
having already completed a PhD in deployed it with great success.
economics at the Massachusetts Within ten years he was running
Institute of Technology (MIT). The entire corporation must the entire company from New York,
Exposed firsthand to the ideas of be viewed as a customer- overseeing innovations that gave
Levitt and other marketing creating and customer- customers better service, and
professors, he began to develop a satisfying organism. making Avis the market leader. In
rigorous outline for the role of Theodore Levitt 1981, when he was recruited to help
marketing in any organization. The save British Airways (BA), he
result was published in 1964, and turned around the fortunes of the
Marketing Management is still airline in a tough environment,
regarded as the seminal textbook on creating a successful model of
the subject. It is credited with being service-oriented business. His