ABSTRACT
Theodore Levitt’s “Marketing Myopia” offered a fresh perspective for managers on how to approach their markets and to put their customers at the center of marketing strategies. Levitt’s views about managers’ inability to see what their customers really needed from their products revolutionized thinking in business and academia. In a commentary on “Marketing Myopia” published in 1975, Levitt explained that industrial companies turn out more complex technological products. Levitt further comments that in the wake of “Marketing Myopia,” some companies have “become obsessively responsive to every fleeting whim of the customer.” Levitt influenced the development of the functional school of marketing, in which pleasing customers’ remains essential if companies want to generate profits. The most famous academic whose thinking has been influenced by Levitt’s work is the American Philip Kotler, a widely celebrated professor and business consultant.
