Marketing myopia, as defined by Levitt, is the failure of management to recognize the scope of its business, because its strategy focuses on the product / service and not on the benefit that the customer seeks or perceives when acquiring it.
Basically the problem is that organizations, their managers, do not know how to answer (or respond inadequately) to the question, what business are we in ? Or what is the same, your strategic mission statement is too limited or too general, ideally it should be focused on the markets you serve and the benefits that customers seek.
It is vital that all executives understand the industry vision as a customer satisfaction process, not a product generation one. An industry begins with the customer and their needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a sales skill. Given the needs of the customer, the industry develops backwards, dealing first with the physical delivery of satisfactions to customers. Then go back even further to the creation of the things that allow you to partially achieve those satisfactions. How these materials are created is indifferent to the customer, so the particular way of manufacturing, processing or whatever cannot be considered a vital aspect of the industry. By last,the industry goes back even further to finding the raw materials needed to make its products… No organization can achieve greatness without a vigorous leader driven by a vibrant will to succeed. A leader must have a vision of greatness, a vision that can produce large numbers of eager followers. In business, the followers are the customers. To produce these customers, the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer creation and satisfaction body. Executives must see themselves not as generators of products, but as providers of value-creating customer satisfaction.a vision that can produce large numbers of eager followers. In business, the followers are the customers. To produce these customers, the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer creation and satisfaction body. Executives must see themselves not as generators of products, but as providers of value-creating customer satisfaction.a vision that can produce large numbers of eager followers. In business, the followers are the customers. To produce these customers, the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer creation and satisfaction body. Executives must see themselves not as generators of products, but as providers of value-creating customer satisfaction.Theodore Levitt, Myopia in Marketing
The proposal, as is clear from the previous paragraph, consists of putting the customer at the center of the company's activities and marketing in the middle of the strategy.
A positive example: Mastercard's core product is your credit card, a shortsighted strategy would focus on offering it as a credit service. Mastercard's strategy is broader and is based on its priceless concept: “There are things that money cannot buy. For everything else, MasterCard. Mastercard is not in the credit business, it is in the business of allowing / making it easy for your customers to take care of what really matters to them.
A negative example: Xerox in the 70s was leading the vigorous market for photocopiers, seeking to ensure that position, it invested in its large R&D center in Palo Alto (PARC), where technologies were developed that promoted the development of personal computing, but XEROX didn't realize what it was up to, it was myopic, it only recognized itself in the photocopy industry. New companies like Apple had to arrive so that what the self-absorbed XEROX had developed and that it missed due to the short vision of its managers began to massify.
In the following videos, first the concept (3 minutes) and second, examples of marketing myopia (36 minutes):
Source: Theodore Levitt, Myopia in Marketing. In: Harvard Business Review, July-August 1960, p.45-56
