Marketing Myopia Theodore Levitt on Growth in Business |
Posted: March 30, 2021 |
00:00:00 Hi this is Bob McLeod and best-selling author of embrace the chaos today I'm going to talk to you about an article 00:00:06 that I read and share with you a message about growth it's an article from the 1950s I think it was 1954 00:00:14 I'll call marketing myopia by fyodor Levitt it was in the Harvard Business Review and it was very instrumental it 00:00:24 became one of those articles that really took a hold among leaders and industries and management 00:00:31 Peter Drucker quoted from it and his famous line of what business are you in Kaymer I believe came from this article 00:00:41 I read through this thirty page article to share with you some strategies on how to grow that's really my point is to 00:00:49 share with you some strategies on how to change and how do you grow in this new disruptive and environment that we live 00:00:54 in today so marketing myopia became famous for the theater or Levesque talked about a number of different 00:01:00 things I'm just going to go through some of those things and share with us and why this is relevant for you if you're 00:01:04 in business today it's called marketing myopia and the central premise 11-piece in Harvard 00:01:12 Business Review is that growth is threatened not because the market is saturated but because management failed 00:01:22 management he claimed failed in a number different industry he's he points that in those days and we could talk about 00:01:30 these days as well but management failed to change and adapt to the new environment that they were living in 00:01:38 today because fundamentally he claims that they didn't to fail to ask the right question and the question was not 00:01:47 how do we sell more products but what industry are we really in he gave the example of the railroad industry no one 00:01:56 talks about the railroad industry today I know but I want to share with you White's relevant so for industry 00:02:02 management claimed that they were in the business of rails of the railroad business but had they thought had they 00:02:11 realized that they were actually in the tree rotation business that would have been 00:02:16 able to grow why because then they would have gotten into cars buses trucks and other modes of transportation and so 00:02:26 he's suggesting we careful that that management was often failing to realize the business that they're in an example 00:02:36 today that's Anna and barry diller coin he said this phrase he said Hollywood today is irrelevant and she's what do 00:02:45 you mean she said well you know if you thought about it some years ago they were basically seven or eight studio 00:02:51 executives who gathered out at a table and decided what movies you and I were gonna watch for today they're completely 00:02:59 irrelevant because we watch entertainment from YouTube Netflix Hulu all these out Amazon and so on and so 00:03:07 forth so the question that Hollywood talked about or thought the or should have been asking themselves is what 00:03:13 business are we in instead of saying we're in the film's business or a movie business when the entertainment business 00:03:19 and that looks very different really be vigilant about asking yourself what business are you in 00:03:24 so I'm just gonna read some of these quick quick bullet points and so what he suggests is that we have this myopia of 00:03:32 marketing that we focus and that's the second point we have marketing myopia product myopia we're so focused on our 00:03:40 own product that we neglect to focus on the customer let me repeat that and this is very important this is a principle 00:03:48 principle thesis of marketing myopia and why organizations I believe are not growing today it's because they're so 00:03:56 focused and again funeral ever talked about love it talks about you know as the fact that there's a product 00:04:03 orientation and that is what management fails to do is to get to a customer orientation you know we talked about 00:04:10 companies improperly defining their purpose earlier but this is really about the fact that you become obsolete when 00:04:18 you focus on production you focus on your product you focus on efficiencies economies of scale you focus on what 00:04:26 your product looks like making your product better instead of doing that a lot of focus on the 00:04:32 customer and the changing needs of the customer and filling those needs you know Amazon is the company that does 00:04:40 this better than anybody else they don't care what business they're in the business that they're in is the business 00:04:45 to satisfy a customer and yes it means you might have to expand a little bit your core to other things 00:04:54 Amazon you know cloud is a wonderful example of a business that Amazon got into instead of just shipping products 00:05:01 and consumers now cloud business that you know aw Isis now is a thirty billion dollar business I understand from Amazon 00:05:08 the point is who look and Jeff Bezos says it's really well is that you know we don't really care as much about you 00:05:16 know our competitors and staying ahead of our competition because if you're good and you're number one well then 00:05:23 what are you doing what do you reference and so we're really obsessed about the customer and I think this article speaks 00:05:29 to that is that we fail when we focus so much on our product and trying to make our product better that we neglect to 00:05:39 look at the changing needs of the customer and responding and filling that need and when you're focusing on the 00:05:46 customer and the customer is always moving yeah the customer is always moving here 00:05:50 and there it keeps you vigilant and so the Theodore Levitt says here is that you can be successful by having a focus 00:05:57 of vigilance towards what the customer wants not looking so much at your product so let me just go through some 00:06:04 of these quickly you know there's a lack of imagination and audacity with with leaders in 00:06:10 businesses you know dinner 11 talks about talks about the fact that you know there's a self-deception that companies 00:06:18 and leaders often have is that we're pretty good we've got a great market position you know we're fine we're just 00:06:23 going to continue to grow at whatever percent you know you're going to grow at and he says that you know that's a bad 00:06:29 idea that self-deception of not reinventing yourself and disrupting yourself and changing yourself all the 00:06:37 time leads to failure because eventually too he's coming to the market that's going 00:06:43 to disrupt your business and get you out of business and he says that there's no such thing and I love this quote there's 00:06:49 no such thing as a growth industry only companies organized and operated to create and capitalize on growth 00:06:59 opportunities there's no such thing as a growth industries only companies organized to capture growth 00:07:07 opportunities and that really goes back to my point I made earlier I make you know a lot is that we're living in such 00:07:13 an environment that's so changing so fast we have to adapt and we have to change we have to have that white clean 00:07:20 sheet of you know paper mindset we're going to adapt and we're not going to be any one thing but we're gonna try to be 00:07:27 whatever the customer needs and yes you're gonna change that means you're gonna change constantly because the 00:07:32 customer needs are changing constantly and then he talks about the fact that you know history of every of every 00:07:39 dyeing you know in the growth industry shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and 00:07:46 undetected decay undetected decay and so what happens is often is Antoni claims is that organizations management get 00:07:56 lazy to get lazy they don't have that sense of urgency to constantly innovate to constantly grow trying to figure out 00:08:03 which way the customers moving and try to adapt and that decay comes from the self-deception of not taking action so 00:08:13 let me summarize I and fundamentally I think the principles are two things you know the first is instead of having a 00:08:20 product orientation have a customer orientation always try to focus on what the customers and then you can respond 00:08:26 and move around with the customer needs then you change right if you focus so much on your product all you're doing is 00:08:31 making a product better and better and what what happens and that's fine for a little while but what happens 00:08:36 competition always catches up to a better product or technology comes in to disrupt your market so that's the first 00:08:42 thing is really have instead of a product orientation a customer orientation and that means understanding 00:08:48 what the customer needs all the time finding new customers finding new opportunities and 00:08:54 working very hard to fill those opportunities that's the first thing the second is ego self-deception that is 00:09:03 what leads to decay if you believe you're in a fundamentally superior product superior position in the 00:09:10 marketplace and you think that's okay and you're gonna be fine for a while you're mistaken because something always 00:09:17 comes up that destroys and disrupts your business and we see it largely today with everything because it's so easy to 00:09:25 come to a market with a new product it really is becomes so much easier there's a lot of funding available for startups 00:09:31 and so on and so forth so fundamentally I believe if you want to grow we've got to change the way we think the way we 00:09:39 act and focusing not on us not on ourselves but on other people and those people are customers and the customers 00:09:48 we don't have focusing on the marketplace that's really the core thing I think to help you grow your business 00:09:54 this is Bob Moog Lonnie wishing you great success and happiness in your life take care have a great day Source : Youtube https://basicknowledge.page/marketing-myopia-theodore-levitt-on-growth-in-business/
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