Ted Levitt On Marketing

by Ted Levitt

Easily the most respected thinker on marketing in the 20th century, Ted Levitt died in 2006 and Harvard Business School Press decided to honor him with a book of his best marketing essays. HBS Press has pulled together the best from his The Marketing Imagination (Revised Edition, 1986) and has included a number of essays that postdate that book. The result is one of those works that a businessperson ignores at his or her peril. I have read most of these articles five or six times and I never fail to be surprised by how prescient Levitt was when it came to predicting the rise of relationship marketing, globalization, and the emphasis on loyalty rather than on satisfaction. Levitt is the best business writer I have ever known. He polishes his nuggets to a fine sheen that allows the reader to concentrate on his good sense rather than on a tortuous style too common in business books.

There are so many riches here. I started with 1983's After the Sale is Over, which, in under ten pages makes the case for relationship marketing. In one classic paragraph, Levitt says, "The sale merely consummates the courtship. Then the marriage begins. How good the marriage is depends on how well the relationship is managed by the seller. That determines whether there will be continued or expanded business or troubles, or whether costs or profits increase." The sentence now seems commonplace but in 1983 only a few academic researchers in Scandinavia were exploring relationship marketing.

In the same piece, Levitt says something that is as true today as when he said it: "One of the surest signs of a bad or declining relationship is the absence of complaints from the customer. Nobody is ever that satisfied....The customer is either not being candid or not being contacted. Probably both. Communication is impaired. The absence of candor reflects the decline of trust." Words to live by.

Then I looked at 1960's Marketing Myopia, which a number of business writers argue was the beginning of modern marketing. In it, Levitt says that after firms succeed, they then fail because they define their industry too narrowly and refuse to look beyond past success to their own obsolescence. Levitt argues that firms need to practice "creative destruction," which later writers would describe as "reinventing the organization." This essay leads directly to the more flexible organization toward which many firms are currently working.

1980's Differentiation-of Anything argued that there is no such thing as a commodity and that products need to be examined in four successive ways: the generic product, the expected product, the augmented product, and the possible product. Levitt paves the way for Starbucks, bottled water, pet rocks, and indirectly a great many service offerings.

There are other classic essays here. My only complaint with the book was that they could have included more articles from Levitt's earlier The Marketing Imagination (Free Press, 1986). I'm thinking of essays like The Globalization of Markets and Relationship Management. Perhaps Free Press wouldn't allow those articles to be added, but what it means is that you have to buy two books to get the best of Levitt. If you get one of the books, though, my guess is that you will want the other one. He is that good.

Reviewed by S4 Consulting

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