 "A Prescient Marketing Philosopher" | 2009-05-01 |
| - Reviewed By User: A1R8MJ3I7D24F7 |
Ted Levitt, along with Peter Drucker and John McKittrick, conceived of the marketing concept: In short, that the purpose of business is to create and keep satisfied customers-- with profit being the reward for doing this. Early on Levitt also saw the importance of globalization, technology and brands. In The Marketing Imagination, published in 1982, Levitt predicted an ongoing global convergence toward simplicity, standardization, reliable brands, and low prices. All of this came true.
Levitt was also an early proponent of design and the importance of intangibles in marketing, particularly for the growing sector of services. He wrote, " Common sense tells us, and research confirms, that people use appearances to make judgements about realities." He further said, "Expectations are what people buy, not things."
He rightly described business transactions as a relationship, and he showed the natural tendency for people to take relationships for granted over time. Specifically, he cited surprise and bad forecasts and signs of a bad relationship. He said this entropic tendency must be consciously counteracted.
In the chapter The Marketing Imagination, which is also the title of the book, he urges businesses to take risks, innovate, and focus on meaningful differentiation. He also warned of the limits of low price and financial innovation as strategies. He starts the chapter with, "Nothing drives progress like imagination. The ideas precede the deed." Then he encourages leaders to boil strategy down to a few simple and clearly written sentences.
In the chapter, Marketing Myopia, Levitt cautions that the greatest dangers come at the point of the greatest success. He cites the decline of railroads, dry cleaning, corner grocery stores, and the disruption television wrought on the movie industry. He also prophetically warned the Detroit auto industry of future trouble if it did not switch its focus from cars to customers. This chapter, which was also the title of a famous article in the Harvard Business Review, reminds us of the ongoing creative destruction of capitalism, and the penalties of hubris and self-satisfaction.
Levitt ends with a discussion of how to manage products during the product lifecycle. He warns of the difficulty of introducing new-to-this-world products, and the need to ensure that the customers' first experience with new products are positive. And since innovation is eventually followed by imitation, he talks about the importance of competing by increasing the frequency of usage, introducing varied uses, finding new users, and developing new uses.
This is a classic marketing text by a deep thinker. He rambles on from time to time, but the detours is worth it. My biggest aha from the book was that low price and brands will win in the end, since money is limited and people naturally avoid risk. This has come to pass. Brands provide scale that leads to low price, and brand reassure customers by reducing risk.
Like Peter Drucker, Ted Levitt is a business philosopher. This book may be more than 25 years old, but like Innovation and Entrepreneurship, the ideas are evergreen. It was good to revisit this book and write this review. |
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| "Marketing in a global economy " | 2009-03-19 |
| - Reviewed By jc-s |
I recently had a need to revisit this book which has been a very valuable resident of my professional bookshelf since July 1997. So why am I choosing to review it now?
Simply stated, and in my view, the current world economic situation requires economies and polities to consider strategic marketing issues more thoroughly. The current reactive responses around the world to a growing global economic crisis may or may not prove to be effective in the short to medium term. I readily confess to being as yet unconvinced by this.
But to address the underlying issues requires a fundamental assessment of a series of contributing factors. Some of those factors are more technical economic issues: including a need to fundamentally reform and regulate (or re-regulate in some cases) aspects of financial accountability and responsibility and there are certainly some encouraging signs in that area.
But what, you may ask, does this have to do with marketing? And why am I recommending a book written by Theodore Levitt over 20 years ago? My work, reading and reflecting over the past twenty years leads me to conclude that Professor Levitt has identified, in his essays, a number of issues that are as relevant to global financial markets as they are to marketing other goods and services. That viable answers to many of the issues (in both areas as well as in many others) requires strategic and lateral thinking about objectives, consequences, impacts and potential risks.
This may be an `old' book but it is not dated. That is why it remains on my professional bookshelf, and why I refer to it often.
Sound, well-articulated principles always have many potential applications.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
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| "A great book" | 2008-12-05 |
| - Reviewed By User: AE1O2DQ4APYRM |
| A great book with all the topics still relevant to today's practice after so many years of publication. |
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 "Too Out-of-date to Be Useful" | 2007-07-28 |
| - Reviewed By hawkeyeff |
| This book may have been useful when it first came out 25 years ago but it is too dated to be applicable today. While I often find gems of information in older books, this doesn't happen to be one of them. Save your money or buy it used. |
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| "Marketing Myopia" | 2005-08-22 |
| - Reviewed By davepamn |
1. The purpose of business is to create and keep customers. Market myopia is a corporate conscious raising experience designed to narrowly direct all energies at satisifying the customer. Marketing is providing what the buyer wants and marketing's purpose is too keep the customer. Selling is mass producing a product. The value is the asset and the asset value is the capacity for it too generate revenue. Selling focuses on production and packaging.
2. To do that you have to produce and deliver goods and services that people want and value at prices and under conditions that are reasonably attractive relative to those offered by others to a proportion of customer large enough to make those prices and conditions possible. (Set a price people will buy at and let production efficiency drive down cost)
3. To continue to do that, the enterprise must produce revenue in excess of costs in sufficient quantity and with sufficient regularity to attract and hold investors in the enterprise, and must keep at least abreast and some ahead of competitive offerings.
In setting your company goal, always set the standard in terms of production volume, profit, and expanded stockholder equity. Never state them in terms of market factors, customer need fulfillment, customer service objectives, or market targets.
4. No enterprise, no matter how small, can do any of this by mere instinct or accident. It has to clarify its purposes, strategies, and plans, and the larger the enterprise the greater the necessity that these be clearly written down, clearly communicated, and frequently reviewed by the senior members of the enterprise.
Market Imagination. Nothing drives imagination like imagination. Imagination starts things going and work makes it happen. Marketing imagination is the starting point of success in marketing. Marketing brings understanding about customers customs and their problems. Marketing provides a means to capture their attention and their customs. Businesses need to findout what problems people are trying too solve. Differentiation represents an imaginative response to the existence of potential customers in such a way as to give them compelling reasons to want to do business with the originating supplier. Marketing provides deeper understanding of consumer behavior. Marketing means asking the customer to do something different than they normally do. The discovery of the simple essence is the essence of marketing imagination. Imagination means constructing a mental picture of what is or not actually present and what has never been actually experienced. Imagination involves intellectual and artistic inventiveness. It means discoverying why customers prefer your product over a competitor and emphasizing the differences through marketing to new customers and existing customers. The essence of competition is providing something different and providing it better than your competitor. These differences weighin strong with customers than price.
Every major industry was once a growth industry. Failure is at the top. One after One company products were runaway substitutes for the products they replaced. The self deceiving cycle includes four factors: 1. The belief that growth is assured by an expanding and more affluent population. 2. The belief that there is no competitive substitute 3. Too much faith in mass production and in the advantages of rapidly declining unit prices as output rises 4. a preoccupation with a product.
5. In all cases there must be an appropriate system of rewards, audits, and controls to assure that what's intended get properly done and, when not, that its quickly rectified. |
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| "A timeless classic" | 2004-06-18 |
| - Reviewed By cbonney7 |
| Though it was first released in 1983, I still do not believe there is a better book on marketing that The Marketing Imagination. It's not a "marketing fad of the week" kind of book, but rather a practically worded treatise on basic concepts that are more often than not overlooked or ignored by those who chase fads and wonder why they're not more successful. Chapter 4, "Differentiation---of Anything" should be tatooed on the forehead of every marketer. |
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