| Marketing myopia is a term used in marketing that describes an
unnecessarily common affliction among business people. It is the failure to see 'down the road'. Many business people make their
decisions based on current circumstances. They do not think about what will likely occur in their industry in the future. One
reason that short sightedness is so common is that people feel that they can not accurately predict the future. They are right,
of course. But just because we cannot accurately predict the future, that is no reason why we should not use the whole range of
business prediction techniques available to us to estimate future circumstances as best we can.
Because the world is inherently unpredictable, we are all subject to myopia to a certain extent according to Theodore Levitt
(1960) who coined the term. Because of this, organizations should be careful not to define themselves too narrowly. For example,
a company that delivers coal should think of itself as being in the energy business. This broad market definition will provide a
greater scope of opportunities as the industry changes. It trains managers to look beyond their current business activities and
think "outside the box". George Steiner (1979) claims that if a buggy whip manufacturer in 1910 defined its business as the
"transportation starter business", they might have been able to make the creative leap necessary to move into the automobile
business when technological change demanded it.
People who focus on marketing strategy, various
predictive techniques, and the customer's lifetime
value can rise above myopia to a certain extent. This can entail the use of long-term profit objectives (sometimes at the
risk of sacrificing short term objectives).
Others have developed similar terms. Kotler and Singh (1981) coined the term "marketing hyperopia", by which they mean a
better vision of distant issues than of near ones. Baughman (1974) uses the term "marketing macropia" meaning an overly broad
view of your industry.
References
- Baughman, J. (1974) Problems and performance of the role of the cheif executive, working paper, Graduate School of
Business Administration, Harvard University.
- Kotler, P. and Singh, R. (1981) "Marketing Warfare in the 1980s", Journal of Business Strategy, winter 1981, pp
30-41.
- Levitt, T. (1960) "Marketing Myopia", Harvard Business Review, July- August, 1960.
- Steiner, G. (1979) Strategic Planning: What every manager should know, The Free Press, New York, 1979.
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