This Harvard Business Review video neatly explains the concept of Marketing Myopia, first coined by former HBR editor Theodore Levitt.
People don't really want a quarter-inch drill, said Levitt. What they really want is a quarter-inch hole.
The video explains how rail companies failed to see that they were really in the transport business, so they watched cars and airlines take their customers. It also warns energy companies against focusing on oil at the expense of developing other sources of energy.
What Levitt meant
Levitt published Marketing Myopia in the Harvard Business Review in 1960. His argument was that industries stall because leaders fall in love with their product and lose sight of the need it serves. Customers hire a product to do a job for them. When a better way to do that job appears, they switch, and the company that defined itself by the old product gets left behind.
The test he proposed is a single question: what business are we really in? The railways answered "railways" when the better answer was "moving people and goods". Film studios answered "movies" when the answer could have been "entertainment". The narrow answer feels safe and specific. The broader, more imaginative answer shows you where your next competitor is coming from.
Putting the question to your team
Marketing myopia is a team problem as much as a strategy problem, because a team that defines its work by its outputs will keep polishing those outputs long after the need has moved on. Try Levitt's question in your next team session:
- What job do our customers actually hire us to do?
- If we vanished tomorrow, what would they use instead?
- Which of our activities serve the need, and which only serve the product?
The conversation that follows usually surfaces assumptions and new perspectives.
Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash
