In my last post, I shared visual notes from “Marketing Myopia” by Theodore Levitt. Since then, my wife and I moved back to Utah and retrieved our belongings, including hundreds of books. One of these books was “The Marketing Imagination” by Levitt.
The book spans less than two hundred thirty pages but took me weeks to read and digest. Although not difficult to understand, some pages were challenging and required multiple readings to absorb the ideas fully.
The book is rich with concepts that require reflection, making it a dense yet enlightening read. Written in the 1980s, during the Cold War and before modern technology, it remains relevant for today’s marketing and product professionals. Levitt’s insights are timeless and deeply impactful.
“The Marketing Imagination” is a classic guide for those focusing on customer-centric and product-centric approaches, aiming for sustained success. Throughout the book, Levitt emphasizes several critical points:
1. Purpose of Business: Money and profit are not the central reasons for a business’s existence. He argues that money is merely the fuel, not the purpose, which resonated with me.
2. Evolution of Services: The book explores how services and service markets evolve, alongside the technologies that enable their growth.
3. Product Concept: Levitt delves into the product concept and its components, linking it to modern ideas like the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and the Kano model. This was a helpful reminder of what MVP should not be.
4. Innovation and Imitation: He discusses how companies advance and fail through innovation and imitation, suggesting that R&D budgets should sometimes focus on reverse engineering successful existing concepts rather than only pioneering new ones.
5. Tangible vs. Intangible Products: Levitt explains the significant differences in product experience between tangible and intangible products, a crucial insight for those working on software products.
By adopting a more imaginative approach to marketing, as Levitt suggests, individuals and companies can better navigate today’s dynamic product development landscape.
I hope these notes encourage you to explore this marketing journey further.