Marketing Myopia

First expressed in an article by Theodore Levitt in Harvard Business Review, it is a short-sighted and inward-looking approach to marketing which focuses on fulfillment of immediate needs of the company rather than focusing on marketing from consumers’ point of view.

Marketing myopia strikes in when the short term goals are given more importance than the long term goals. Some examples being:
– More focus on selling rather than building relationships with the customers.
– Predicting growth without conducting proper research.
– Mass production without knowing the demand.
– Giving importance to just one aspect of the marketing attributes without focusing on what customer actually wants.
– Not changing with the dynamic consumer environment

Some of the real-world examples include:
– Kodak lost much of its share to Sony cameras when digital cameras boomed and Kodak didn’t plan for it.
– Nokia losing its marketing share to android and IOS.
– Hollywood didn’t even tap the television market as it was focused just on movies.
– Yahoo (worth $100 billion dollars in 2000) lost to Google and was bought by Verizon at approx. $5 billion (2016).