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In Marketing, the ā€œCā€ Word Cannot Exist

In the CEO Afterlife

Marketers of food, health and beauty aids, and laundry detergents became so hung up with image differentiation that they overlooked the inherent value of the product, and private labels picked up the slack. Customer insight is the precursor to product innovation within the high tech and information age sectors. Then they act upon it.

Marketing 257
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Are These Systems Serving or Subverting Organization Results?

The Practical Leader

Harvard Business School Professor Ted Levitt, a leading research and author in management, marketing, and former editor of Harvard Business Review, said “Early decline and certain death are the fate of companies whose policies are geared totally and obsessively to their own convenience at the total expense of the customer.”

System 52
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Innovative Service Leaders Nurture Trust

Lead Change Blog

In the olden days, work relationships were agrarian and relied on extended family for production. ” These words of Harvard professor and marketing guru Ted Levitt were written about customers. The family in the field was the family at home. Nobody is ever THAT satisfied, especially not over an extended period of time.

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The Marketing Imagination: A book review by Bob Morris

First Friday Book Synopsis

The Marketing Imagination (Expanded Edition) Theodore Levitt Free Press (1986) Do not be misled by the date of this Expanded Edition: Of the more than 27 gazillion books on marketing now in print, none has had a greater impact than has this one. It is truly a masterpiece. By way of background, in 1960 (in [.].

Levitt 80
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Its a Jungle In There

CEO Blog

It shines through in the book) Product "Be excellent or be gone". and "Do you consider the impact you have when selling your product or service?" Apparently his Minnesota home has a life size elephant replica and 40 live tropical birds. He sounds like quite a character. Sweat the small stuff. It provides purpose. Interesting.

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Just because you can make an omelet, doesnā€™t mean youā€™re a restaurateur!

Mills Scofield

Most organizations think of innovation in terms of creating value: products, services and experiences. Saul quotes Theodore Levitt (Harvard Business School Professor), “People don’t want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole. Yet few are really good at truly understanding what the customer needs.

Kaplan 151
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Marketing Myopia, 50-Plus Years On

Harvard Business Review

It's hard to overestimate the influence Ted Levitt's "Marketing Myopia" has had on the world of marketing and beyond. Why has "Marketing Myopia" lasted so well over a 50-year-period when so many management big ideas have gone the way of the failed industries Levitt cites in his classic? Its clarity and its ambition.

Levitt 11