Question

What is marketing Myopia and how does it relate to value, how relevant is marketing myopia in today's marketplace?

Answer 1

Marketing Myopia was a concept given by Theodor Levitt in the Harvard Business Review in 1960. This concept describes that the marketers should focus on the needs of the customers, and not on sales and stuffing the customer with their products. But Marketing Myopia was a failure and raised a lot of criticism because it was narrow minded. It focused on only certain attributes of product and completely ignored product quality, customer needs, etc.

When a firm uses this marketing concept in their business, customers become dissatisfied with the product or service. At first they will reach out or complain on social media, then slowly would stop using the product and the business starts losing more customers and it gets worse. A business that fails to evolve fails in the market.

The business can move beyond marketing myopia and understand the wants of customers and act accordingly. Customer development helps the business to know the wants and needs of customer. The example of the firms going out of business due to such circumstances are plenty. For example, blackberry phones had 50% of US market and 20% of world market in 2006, but when smartphones were introduced, blackberry didn't go forward much with the new trend and now it holds 0% of market in smartphone industry. Similarly, Nokia was very famous once, but with time and changes in technology, Nokia didn't change their product, so Samsung and iPhone captured the market. When a company focuses more on sales than on marketing or knowing the needs of customers that's when marketing myopia strikes in.

In today's world, a business should not completely rely on this marketing myopia, but it could take the help of this concept in their business. The disadvantage to this theory is the missing consumer satisfaction part, apart from that the concept can help a business to understand its industry, its business model and its product. This part is also necessary for business. Thus, the business can get an enlightenment about itself and its needs by this concept. That is good for the development of firm, but not to forget about the customers. After analysing the model of the business and business needs, then the firm must also analyse the market, the customer, the changes happening and how these changes can increase the customer satisfaction in any way.