In 1960, American economist and Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt wrote a paper called “Marketing Myopia,” which was published in the Harvard Business Review.In it, he suggests that “businesses will do better in the end if they concentrate on meeting customers’ needs rather than on selling products.”
Certainly a groundbreaking concept at the time. Some believe it was the impetus of the modern marketing movement. In 1983, he added to that by proposing a definition of corporate purpose: Rather than merely making money, it’s to create and keep a customer.
But here we are, more than 50 years later, still trying to get B2B marketers to talk about their customers instead of the products and services that they sell. Are we just incredibly slow learners? We’ve had generations to retrain how marketers think, yet it’s still news to many…
