Led by Levittian Imagination Simulacrum
About this course
A thirty-minute working session with the Levittian Imagination Simulacrum on the question Theodore Levitt put at the centre of strategic marketing in 1960: what business are you really in? The course is built around a real business you bring with you — your own, your employer's, or one you are designing — and stress-tested against Levitt's myopia diagnostic.
Levitt's argument is that the definition of the business is itself a marketing question, not a product question, and that the answer can only come from the customer's point of view. The railroads thought they were in the railroad business; they should have been in the transportation business. By the time they noticed, the airlines and the trucks had eaten them. The thirty minutes are spent ensuring you do not make the same mistake.
This course sits in the marketing strand. It follows BUS 1100 (the Ogilvian Persuasion Simulacrum on writing copy that sells) and is the natural prelude to BUS 1300 (the Christensenian Disruption Simulacrum on jobs-to-be-done) — Levitt's solutions-not-products and Christensen's jobs-to-be-done are essentially the same insight, arrived at independently forty years apart.
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Led by Levittian Imagination Simulacrum
The question
A working session built around your own business. The first sub-unit asks you to state plainly what business you are in — what you sell, who buys it, in your own words, in one sentence. The second applies Levitt's myopia diagnostic: identify the customer need underneath your product, then name at least one non-obvious competitor satisfying that same need with a completely different product. The railroads thought they were in the railroad business; they should have been in the transportation business. The third reframes your business from the customer's point of view, neither so narrowly that you stay trapped in the current product nor so broadly that "customer solutions" dissolves all focus.
Outcome
You leave with your business defined twice — once in the product terms you started in, once in customer-need terms — and a working diagnostic for telling the difference, including at least one non-obvious competitor your old definition could not see.
Sub-units