Good morning. Write down the business you're in. That one sentence has already picked your competitors for you.
Marketing.
Marketing Myopia
If you finish the sentence 'we're in the ___ business' in the words you'd actually use at a dinner party rather than the ones on the website, who does that sentence make your competitors — and is the thing most likely to take your customers within five years anywhere on the list it produces?
Theodore Levitt taught at Harvard Business School for most of his career and later edited the Harvard Business Review, but the argument that made his name arrived early. 'Marketing Myopia' ran in the magazine in 1960 and has been reprinted ever since. Its claim is that industries don't decline because demand dies. They decline because the people running them defined the business too narrowly, then ran it beautifully. The American railroads were not finished off by a fall in demand for moving people and freight — that demand kept growing. They were finished off by deciding they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business, which meant cars, trucks and aircraft never registered as competitors until the traffic had gone. Levitt laid the same charge against Hollywood: it believed it was in the movie business rather than the entertainment business, and so treated television as a threat instead of an outlet. The trap is that a narrow definition looks exactly like focus. It reads as discipline in a strategy document, right up to the morning something arrives from a category you weren't counting — and by then the question isn't how to respond, it's whether you still can.
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