Did this man invent marketing
For the world of management - or the trend-setting part of it which read the Harvard Business Review (HBR) - 1960 was the year that marketing began. Extraordinary as it seems today, until HBR published an article by a German- American academic called Theodore Levitt saying that ’industry is a customer-satisfying process, not a goods-producing process’, most managers operated on the principle that people would buy whatever their companies produced, with the aid of a little advertising.

It was one where the public was so pleased to have any choice of goods after the barren years of World War II that consumer products virtually sold themselves. There might be competition between different makes of soap powder or toothpaste, but no-one in industry seriously considered probing more deeply into what customers wanted, or might want in the future.
Levitt changed all that with one article in HBR, entitled ’Marketing Myopia’. (8) ... His message was very simple. Selling was not marketing, he pointed out. ’Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. (9) ... And it does not, as marketing invariably does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer.’
Levitt began by explaining that every industry was once a growth industry. But growth will not continue through improvements in productivity or cost reduction alone. (10) ... He cited the Detroit automobile industry as a prime example: ruled by the production ethos, in 1960 it was simply giving the customer what it thought the customer should have. ’Detroit never really researched the customer’s wants. It only researched the kinds of things it had already decided to offer him,’ Levitt wrote. Eventually, it was punished by the Japanese with their compact cars. (11) ...
Industries can die if they don’t understand how their markets are changing, Levitt warned, citing his famous horse-whip example: after the automobile killed the horse and carriage as personal transportation, makers of horse-whips could not save themselves by improving the product. (12) ... These days, although Levitt called marketing a ’stepchild’, it has come a long way towards growing up.
A Only a’thoroughly customer-oriented management’ can maintain it.
B It is such a far-sighted assessment that many companies are still failing it.
C They needed to reinvent their whole business by studying what customers would now want fanbelts, say, or air cleaners.
D It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about.
E It set him up as the first marketing guru and over the years HBR has sold hundreds of thousands of reprints.
F These were what customers wanted after the oil price shocks of. the early 1970s.
G Business in the 1950s had been a complacent, producer-oriented world.

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