Marketing Myopia

Marketing Myopia is the failure to define an organization's purpose in terms of its function from the consumers' point of view. For example, railway companies that define their markets in terms of trains, rather than transportation, fail to recognize the challenge of competition from cars, airlines, and buses. It is therefore necessary to define the needs of the consumer in more general terms rather than product-specific terms.

Marketing Myopia is the short sighted look of the managers in wrongly identifying the category and goals of the company, not looking at the whole industry of the product neglecting the fields of opportunities in their area of industry, not listening to the customer's real needs.

The customer orientation has also been considered as a type of Marketing Myopia. Firms overemphasize the satisfaction of customer wants and needs and, as a result, have ignored competition. A competitor orientation has been proposed as a replacement for the customer orientation; with this orientation, a firm’s strategy is influenced by its competitors. (1)

Analysis:

At some point in its development, every industry can be considered a growth industry, based on the apparent superiority of its product. But in case after case, industries have fallen under the shadow of mismanagement. What usually gets emphasized is selling, not marketing. This is a mistake, because selling focuses on the needs of the seller, whereas marketing concentrates on the needs of the buyer. In this widely quoted and anthologized article, first published in 1960, Theodore Levitt argues that "the history of every dead and dying 'growth' industry shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay." But, as he illustrates, memories are short. The railroads serve as an example of an industry whose failure to grow is due to a limited market view. Those behind the railroads are in trouble not because the need for passenger transportation has declined or even because cars, airplanes, and other modes of transport have filled that need. Rather, the industry is