Marketing myopia is when a company focuses on its own wants rather than the customer’s needs, resulting in a resistance to change and loss of reputation and business. Harvard Business School professor Theodore C. Levitt coined the term in 1960, suggesting that companies fail to ask themselves important questions about their business. By exploiting these answers, a company can better serve its customers and increase business. A myopic view can limit a company’s market and make it vulnerable to market changes. A company should consider factors outside of its business and diversify its customer base to avoid marketing myopia.
Myopia is the medical term for myopia. Marketing myopia, then, refers to marketing practices that are myopic or self-directed rather than forward-looking or created with external factors in view. This type of marketing is generally considered undesirable. It inclines a company to focus on what it wants rather than what the customer wants, and tends to create a culture resistant to change. Both often result in loss of reputation, loss of business and poor business practices.
The term “marketing myopia” may have been coined by Harvard Business School professor emeritus of marketing, Theodore C. Levitt, who wrote an article called “Marketing myopia” for a 1960 edition of the Harvard Business Review. In this article, he proposed that companies develop marketing myopia because they fail to ask themselves questions frequently and generally assume they know the answers to vital questions like “What business are we in?” The philosophy at the time was that the answer to these questions was self-evident. Levitt suggested that these answers were not obvious and that, by exploiting them, a company could better serve its customers, thereby increasing its business.
For example, a company that traditionally manufactures springs used in retractable pens might say that it is in the spring manufacturing business and will likely sell itself as a spring manufacturer. In doing so, it limits itself and its market. Even worse, he trained potential customers to think of the business only in terms of springs. The company developed marketing myopia. He is only looking at his past and is assuming that his current business market will sustain him in the future.
That kind of thinking is extremely dangerous. If retractable pens suddenly become obsolete, this company will have nothing left to sell. After all, it is a manufacturer of pen springs. That’s how you think and how your customers think. Now that the spring market for pens has dried up, there are no more customers.
If the same company did not have such a myopic and narrow view of its objective, two things would have happened. First, they would have carefully looked at factors outside their business, such as market trends and consumer preferences. They would have seen the fall of pen springs coming and would have prepared a contingency plan so that the business would continue to prosper despite the change in the market.
Second, they would have wondered what business they were in and probably would have realized that they were really in the business of making coiled wire. This would allow them to consider what other types of products could use their wound yarn and diversify their customer base. When the pen market crashed, your company would have other markets to turn to.
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