Article - Marketing Myopia – 100% Relevant Today

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AUTHOR: Robert Craven

I bang on about ‘marketing myopia’. A lot.

Why? Because 60 years after the phrase was coined, nothing much has changed. Too many agencies and businesses are still self-obsessed and fail to understand what their customers want. And as a result they die.

What is marketing myopia?

”A company views marketing strictly from the standpoint of selling a specific product…

rather than from the standpoint of fulfilling customer needs.”

Professor Theodore Levitt’s 1960 HBR article ‘Marketing Myopia’ described a damaging problem in business: a near-sighted focus on selling products rather than taking a bigger picture view of what customers really want. He argued for organisations to define their categories and competition more broadly around customer needs. He summed it up with the often mis-quoted or mis-attributed: “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole”.

Marketing myopia is an over-focus on products.

Levitt said: "The history of every dead and dying 'growth' industry shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay." In other words, sustained growth depends on how broadly you define your business – and how carefully you gauge your customers’ needs.

The failure of Kodak, Blockbuster and Encyclopaedia Britanicca, and more recent failures like Arcadia, Edinburgh Woollen Mill and Debenhams, could also be attributed to marketing myopia: a failure to concentrate on what the customer wants but rather to concentrate on business efficiency. The Beatles would say: “They hadn’t noticed that the lights had changed”.

An organization must learn to think of itself not as producing goods or services but as doing the things that will make people want to do business with it. This is not rocket science.

So what

Levitt tells us that:

We should not obsess about tactics first.

We should not obsess about strategy first.

We should obsess about the customer first.

In other words, we need to nail the basics: segmentation (who we are selling to) and differentiation (what makes us different).

I still talk to too many agencies that haven’t properly figured out the Marketing 101 basics of segmentation and differentiation.

Too many agencies (and their clients) haven’t sorted the basics

Let me talk to those agencies. I know you are saying to yourself: “He doesn’t mean us, or does he?”.

Here goes.

The consequence of not nailing segmentation and differentiation is an unfocussed and fuzzy offering that is ineffective.

I am sure you will have had a couple of workshops or days with a consultant talking about segmentation and differentiation. But most of you cop-out of the tough decisions.

You hate to say: “No, we don’t do that” or “No, you are not the best customer for us”.

It is this desire to be all things to all people that frustrates the hell of out of potential customers.

They are thinking “Are you right for me? What is your real strength?” and you come back with some weasel words like: “We work with all sizes of businesses offering a full spectrum of digital marketing services at a highly competitive price.”

Remember it is your understanding of the customer that informs your strategy that forms your tactics. Customer first, please.

In my humble opinion…

I think it is time to grow some.

Stop cut-and-pasting your competitors’ customer proposition and shifting around a few words. Create your own.

In the customers’ eyes, be different, stand out.

Be relevant but only to your target customer.

Respond directly to their To-Do lists, their needs, wants, hurts and itches.

After all, why should people bother to buy from you when they can buy from the competition?