The New Marketing Myopia

The Old Marketing Myopia

Despite Theodore Levitt’s highly acclaimed work, “Marketing Myopia “, published in 1960 in the Harvard Business Review, many businesses have continued to exhibit a “short-sighted and inward looking approach to marketing that focuses on the needs of the company instead of defining the company and its products in terms of the customers’ needs and wants.”

This has created opportunity for their competitors, and trauma for their shareholders, with famous examples including, Nokia, Kodak, DEC and more.

Marketing Entropy

Consistent with, and additional to, this is resistance to change. The combination can be disastrous. I call this “Marketing Entropy” because it emphasises the ramifications of businesses being less successful due to the failure of management to see and adjust to changing market needs, wants and preferences.

As in the Nokia case, because a perception of success, product orientation and resistance to change can often be the enemy of effective innovation, the adoption of market-based orientation can be seen as unnecessary change, particularly when operational management present arguments such as “We’ve been right up to now, why change?” or “That’s the way we’ve always done it around here”.

An Even More Potent Marketing Myopia?

But an even more serious decadence has arisen in the past 30 years that threatens to further exacerbate marketing entropy, business uncertainty, and the fall of what should be immortal businesses… The loss of understanding of the word, “Marketing”!

This phenomenon and the consequent confusion it has caused around the world in lay-people, untrained and uneducated executives, is both chronic and widespread. It presents ongoing and lingering limitations to business efficiency.

Those defining "Marketing" as meaning "promotion", "advertising" or “selling” are destined to a whole world of pain. This definition is wrong!

Initiated by a trend in the 1980’s when smaller advertising and sales promotions agencies and service providers, took to describing themselves as a “marketing agency” in order to differentiate themselves and imply knowledge beyond their core capabilities, the ambiguity that followed became infectious. Frequently, entrepreneurs behind this trend were sales-focused, without concern or awareness that their lack of knowledge, training or true ability to deliver would spawn an epidemic of disinformation that snow-balled motives of sales growth and profit generation of their own entities at the cost of the needs of their clients.

Sadly, an echo effect is EXACTLY what frequently occurs in the new medium of the internet. While the internet, and the dawn of social media, is nothing more than a mode of communication… like a mixture of talk-back radio and newspapers, WITHOUT editing, ethics, or professional scrutiny, it has become a source of deception, with digital snake-oil sales people claiming they provide “marketing strategy” when they are truly hawking Facebook advertising, Google Adwords, or PR copy under the guise of the poorly misnamed terminology, “Content Marketing”.

While this continuing misconstruction on the art and science of Marketing continues, the professional use of the skill is tarnished by indifference, error and inefficiency.

Marketing will continue to be considered fluff and bravado and/or smoke and mirrors, with massive overspend, misspend, or underspend. It will remain an untrusted and under respected discipline. The many valid strategic and managerial tools, methods, models and processes that properly trained professionals possess will be lost to hype, spin, unskilled misuse or forgotten memory.

Employers Beware

Succession planning, recruiters and HR professionals should be hiring conversant of the Hierarchies of Marketing, rather employing people on the basis of fabricated resumes, interviewee charisma, or the ability to manipulate personality tests.

Promotions salespeople should be run out of town if they claim to be marketing professionals; particularly if they lack formal education in psychology, quantitative methods, market research, business law, accounting and financial management, information technology, mass media, economics, advertising and sales promotions management, HR, organisational management and more!

Betrayed by Bureaucratic Marketing?

When the marketing professional blossomed, in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was a time when university lecturers were commercially active and participants in corporate decision making, like medicine the best practitioners because the leading teachers, passing on their advanced skills.

However, as pure academics encroached upon the space, and the “publish or perish” syndrome gained real estate, schools of marketing became more academically staffed and less in touch with practical commercial practice.

While other tertiary professions continued to pool their knowledge in academia, advancing the science, commercial practitioners were turned away, even scoffed at for delivering papers that academics considered were poorly cited or contrary to their purist academic beliefs.

While chemical, medical, genetic, engineering, computer, robotics, solar and other sciences have developed, marketing academia has returned to the primitive roots it escaped in the school of economics where publishing for publishing sake and remoteness from reality flourished… theory and rehashed models, the same findings reworded. (Does anyone recall that we knew about competitive rivalry, power of suppliers and buyers, ease of industry entry and exit, and threat of substitutes BEFORE Michael Porter's five forces? Well we did!)

With the halls of academia filled with PhDs awarded for deep dives into specific areas of knowledge, why hasn’t someone actually said, “Stop! marketing is the management of exchange and requires integration and balance of many skills, many activities and many sub-disciplines… breadth of understanding is just as important if not more important, than depth!”

Call for Courage before Correctness

Why can’t digital promotions people declare themselves to be digital promotions people? Why deceive, or misrepresent themselves to be something they are not?

If sales directors can be sales directors, can’t digital promotions directors exist under an accurate title? Surely, they would find more satisfaction being called upon to deal with the subject matter they know best that to try to “wing it” under of title of CMO when they are not properly trained or knowledgeable in that broader discipline of strategic marketing management?

This new form of marketing myopia – near sightedness towards misuse and misinterpretation of the meaning of the word, “Marketing”, is by far the most caustic, most destructive, most corrosive and apathetic failure in modern business management… one that threatens the credibility and even the future of the marketing profession and the erosion of a motherlode of business insight and knowledge: It is tantamount to burning books!

I urge anyone who shares my concern and my perspective to share, forward, like and comment on this article in the hope that enough will hear to alter the downward spiral that we are witnessing.