Marketing Myopia: Levitt’s 1960 HBR article

The point of Levitt’s article was that businesses should focus on customer needs rather than business ideas. The illusion that a firm is in a growth industry is a common one. There are no growth industries! Presumptive growth is not guaranteed. They instead need focus on the vision of customer needs. You are not in the business of a particular industry, you’re in the business of customer value creation.

People cannot accurately predict the future and therefore there is no such thing as a growth industry. Management needs to see the broader market; you need to be single minded about what the customer wants.

Self-Deceiving of Management:

• Growth through market segment expansion
• Too much faith in manufacturing
• Preoccupation of careful scientific experiments;
• Too narrow understanding of the customer / narrow industry view.

Examples, Petroleum = Energy not oil!

Corner Store = Food distribution not retail groceries!

Buggy = Transportation not horse and carriage!

Retirement Homes  = Childhood for Seniors

If the management understood that they were in the transportation industry not in the horse and carriage industry; they might well have avoid the decline of GM in the 2000s.

Big Bang Disruptions:

The idea with Big Bang Disruption is it is an article that buildings on Christensen’s Crossing the Chasm.

Key takeaways:

• Make your exit at the right time;
• Jump before your garbage falls on you;
• Wrong attitude or right attitude (is this Big Bang Disruption really for MBAs and academics?)
• They aren’t trying to disrupt you, you’re banker job is just part of the debris.

Unencumbered development: hackathon culture.

Unconstrainted growth: there are the 5 segments by Everett Rogers Crossing the Chasm, now there are trial users.

Undisciplined strategy: start life with a better performance at a lower price.  Venmo; faster cheaper. Not trying to disrupt your business, you’re business is collateral damage. Be ready for the fast escape.

• Consult your truth tellers: candor Jack Welch.
• Pinpoint your market entry:
• Launch seemingly random experiments: confuse people
• Survive catastrophic success
• Capture winner-take-all markets
• Create bullet time
• Anticipate saturation
• Shed assets before they become liabilities
• Quit while you’re ahead
• Escape your own black hole
• Become someone else’s components
• Move to a new singularity.
• Strategic Discipline: Compete on all three disciplines at once.
• New-Product Marketing: Market to all segments of users immediately. Be ready to scale up and exist swiftly.
• Innovation Method: rapid-fire, low-cost experimentation on popular platforms (Reddit, Facebook, Twitter)d onto the technology needed to deliver the Model-T.