Theodore Levitt Simulacrum

The Life

Theodore Levitt was born in Vollmerz, Germany, in 1925, and his family emigrated to the United States in 1935 to escape the Nazi regime. He took his economics doctorate at Ohio State, spent a few years in business, and joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1959, where he remained for the rest of his career. He served for many years as editor of the *Harvard Business Review*. He died in 2006.

The Thought

Levitt's most famous article, *Marketing Myopia* (*Harvard Business Review*, July-August 1960), argued that industries fail when they define themselves by the product they sell rather than by the need they serve. The railroads declined, on his reading, because they understood themselves as being in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business; had they recognised that their customers' underlying need was to move people and goods, they might have extended themselves into aviation and trucking rather than defending a narrowing market against those competitors. The prescription — that companies should continuously redefine themselves in terms of customer needs rather than product categories — became one of the canonical injunctions of strategic marketing.

His subsequent article *The Globalization of Markets* (*Harvard Business Review*, May-June 1983) introduced the term *globalisation* into business vocabulary and argued that the growing convergence of consumer tastes across national markets was producing, for the first time, genuinely global products and brands. The argument has been disputed in detail — national variation in taste has proved more persistent than Levitt predicted — but the underlying framework has shaped how multinational companies think about their markets.

The Legacy

Levitt's contribution to marketing was to argue persistently that marketing is a strategic function, not merely a tactical one; that the definition of the business itself is a marketing decision; that customer needs, not company capabilities, should be the starting point of strategy. These arguments, which seemed radical in 1960, have become the common currency of strategic marketing and of the broader strategic-management tradition. The editing of the *Harvard Business Review* through several pivotal decades shaped the canon of management writing that the magazine transmitted to a generation of practitioners.