The term Marketing Myopia was coined by the late Harvard Business School marketing professor, Theodore Levitt, in a 1960 HBR article (republished in 2004). The heart of the article, according to Deighton, a distinguished Harvard Professor, is Levitts argument that companies are too focused on producing goods or services and dont spend enough time understanding what customers want or need. Therefore, he encouraged executives to switch from a production orientation to a consumer orientation. As Levitt used to tell his students, People dont want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!

The genius of the original article is that it is so easy to be myopic when it comes to marketing, says Deighton. Any marketer is obligated to be concerned with programs, tactics, campaigns, etc. Unfortunately, the clock never stops long enough to answer the question, Why are you doing what you are doing? So its far too easy to lose sight of the big picture. The other thing that made the article so significant at the time of its publication is that it reminded CEOs that marketing is part of their job: [Levitt] tells the leader of the organization: you are in business because you have a customer. Therefore you have to think about marketing, Deighton explains.

In 2010, Craig Smith at INSEAD, Minette Drumwright at UT Austin, and Mary Gentile at Babson, published a paper criticizing Marketing Myopia. They posited that marketers have taken Levitts advice to an extreme, creating a new kind of short sightedness, marked by a single-minded focus on the customer, a narrow definition of the customer, and a failure to address the multiple stakeholders who have arisen out of the changed societal context of business. There is no doubt that Levitt believed the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer-satisfying organism, and Deighton admits that this is one of the potential pitfalls of Levitts original idea: it puts great trust in the consumer. In his original article, Levitt acknowledged how difficult it can be to listen to customers; he wrote: Consumers are unpredictable, varied, fickle, stupid, shortsighted, stubborn, and generally bothersome. But Smith, Drumwright, and Gentile go even further, arguing that its not just about listening to consumers but about hearing all of the stakeholders who contribute to your companys success.

1. Do you agree or disagree with Smith, Drumwright and Gentiles assessment of the concept of Marketing Myopia? Why or why not? What stakeholder(s) might be important to listen to in formulating a new take on marketing Myopia and why?