Marketing Imagination: New, Expanded Edition [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Philip Kotler Northwestern University Ted Levitt's name is synonymous with marketing. His writings consistently offer rich insights served up in a souffle of good style. In The Marketing Imagination, Levitt takes the reader through some important new concourses in the marketing world that he has explored deeply during this decade.

The Wall Street Journal MBAs everywhere encounter Ted Levitt's name on their required-reading lists, and it is likely to remain there long after experts on Japanese management, one-minute management and high-output management finally drop from the bestseller lists. The Marketing Imagination is a much-needed reminder of the ideals to which managers should bind their ambitions.

Newsday Ted Levitt is the best marketing mentor around...The Marketing Imagination is guaranteed to provoke controversy. It's a crackling text...every argument it stirs will be worthwhile.

Tom Brown Honeywell, Inc. A book for everyone in business. It is provocative and challenging.

Industry Week Ted Levitt's literate, thoughtful treatment takes the reader from the broadest theoretical concepts to specific how-to pointers.

Atlanta Constitution and Journal Marketers will eventually have to learn the lessons of The Marketing Imagination or risk a career change.

Since its publication in 1983, The Marketing Imagination has been widely praised as the classic, all-inclusive "Levitt on Marketing." Now Theodore Levitt -- renowned as the Harvard Business School's "guru of marketing" -- has newly expanded his original work to recap the developing globalization debate and to respond to his critics. He has also added his famed McKinsey Award-winning essay "Marketing Myopia," and included detailed accounts of how to maximize the product life cycle and achieve the delicate balance between innovation and imitation. As before, this new edition of The Marketing Imagination shows Levitt at his best -- sharp, knowledgeable, erudite, and, yes, as imaginative as ever.

A unique approach to the marketing/ management concept discusses product and marketing objectives, the relationship between client and supplier, the industrialization of service, and other facets of effective marketing strategies.

Theodore Levitt is Editor of the Harvard Business Review and Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. One of the most widely read and respected figures in marketing, he is a four-time winner of the annual McKinsey Award for the best article in the Harvard Business Review.

Chapter 1

Marketing and the Corporate Purpose

Nothing in business is so remarkable as the conflicting variety of success formulas offered by its numerous practitioners and professors. And if, in the case of practitioners, they're not exactly "formulas," they are explanations of "how we did it," implying with firm control over any fleeting tendencies toward modesty that "that's how you ought to do it." Practitioners, filled with pride and money, turn themselves into prescriptive philosophers, filled mostly with hot air.

Professors, on the other hand, know better than to deal merely in explanations. We traffic instead in higher goods, like "analysis," "concepts," and "theories." In short, "truth." Filled with self-importance, we turn ourselves hopefully into wanted advisers, consultants filled mostly with woolly congestion.

I do not wish to disparage either, but only to suggest that these two legitimately different and respectable professions usually diminish rather than enhance their reputations when intruding too much or with too little thought on each other's turf.

How often have we heard executives of venerable age and high repute or entrepreneurs flushed with recent wealth pronounce with lofty certainty and imperial rectitude exactly what produces business success? All they really tell, however, in cleaned-up retrospection, is the story of how they themselves happen to have done it. Listen to ten, and you'll generally get ten different pieces of advice.

Listen to ten professors, and you'll generally get advice by some multiple of ten. The difference is not that professors believe more firmly in abundance. Rather, besides teaching, professors are also paid to think. Hence, lacking direct experience, each is likely to think up several different ways to get to the same place. People of affairs are paid merely to get there, and it is almost certain that when they do they'll think the only way there is the one they have taken, even when their neighbors got there by a different route.

On this score, people of affairs are scarcely unique. Consider the many versions we have heard from successful novelists of the "right way" to work: Sit down and get started, don't wait for inspiration; write when you're ready, not when the schedule says so; write from dawn till noon; write from dusk till dawn; always write in the same place; never stick to the same place for long; write only about what you know, don't invent; only invent, all else is mere confusion. The expert at doing things, obviously, is not reliably expert in either understanding what he does or why it works, certainly not in giving consistently good advice.

As a certified academic who is paid, however paltry the sum, to think, teach, and advise about the practices of those in practical work, of one thing I am totally convinced: the healthy state of business practice in the capitalist democracies. The state of business practice reflects the quality of the executive mind and its effective commitment to the purposes of business itself.

The modern executive mind is in very good condition indeed, especially in the larger and, usually therefore, global corporations. Indeed, awed admiration is what any intelligent and fair-minded analyst will come away with when he studies the large corporation of our times. For he will note its extraordinary efficiency, flexibility, agility, and internal diversity; the dedication and remarkable good spirits of its vast variety of employees; its attention to quality in what it does and to fairness in how it behaves; and the studiousness with which it approaches major undertakings. Notwithstanding all the self-righteousness parading of unpleasant contrary facts these days, no institution of any size or diversity, whether government or private, taking any reasonable combination of desirable attributes, can come anywhere near the large corporations of the modern capitalist democracies. Nor is this merely a matter of their having a head start historically. Fortune's list of "Top 500" U.S. manufacturing corporations changes constantly, as does the list of top financial institutions. Federal Trade Commission studies of "industrial concentration" repeatedly show shifting patterns of leadership in one industry sector after another.

Obviously, being ahead or having gotten a head start counts for not a lot within America's little corner of the capitalist world. But the parallel fact that everywhere the capitalist corporations, as a group, are widening their lead over their lagging imitators in the noncapitalist world is extraordinarily significant. It means that being capitalistic gives them a genetic edge. Capitalism simply works better, and anybody who argues the opposite does just that. He argues. He simply doesn't have the facts.

One of the most interesting of these facts is that those who seek to catch up with the more advanced and achieving institutions of our times invariably seek to do it by some sort of selective imitation of the modern capitalist corporations. ("We'll take your best and ignore the rest.") Traffic in the opposite direction is negligible or nonexistent. Nothing could be more unmistakably meaningful. Nothing is more flattering to capitalism's protean prowess.

Even where this imitation now has a long history, having been generously helped with facilitating patents, designs, machines, control systems, technicians-on-loan, cash, whole factories supplied by the capitalist corporations -- as they have been in Soviet Russia ever since Lenin's New Economic Policy first imported Henry Ford in 1923 -- even when helped with the latest methods and technologies, the beneficiaries quickly fall behind again into inefficiency, sloth, and irrelevance. Why, one must ask, after more than half a century of eager (if grudging) imitation and girls of capitalist technologies in the factories and on the farms have the Soviets fallen with uncomprehending frustration ever farther behind? Even their much-vaunted advanced fighter plane recently defected to Japan turned out to be advanced only in its packaging. At least they learned that much from us -- the importance of packaging. This constant failure of helpful imitation to take hold persists also in nations with feudal military dictatorships and in the false democracies of South America, Southeast Asia, and now deimperialized Africa.

By what magic do the large corporations of the capitalist democracies work so well? Is it simply that they're capitalist, that they operate in democratic political environments, or some combination of the two? Or what?

The combination is crucial, emphatically. Being capitalist means the liberating absence of the feudal incubus, traditions that fetter people to their assigned masters rather than to their own chosen purposes. Operating in political democracies means the likelihood of public resistance to constantly advancing governmentalization of society, some reasonable probabilities against a constantly expanding and suffocating bureaucratization of the entire polity. (It is instructive, I think, to note that no dictatorship or tyranny has ever been voted in by people. People, however humble, however limited their education, quite naturally and sensibly resist Caesarism, however elegantly it may be packaged or differently presented.)

Nor is it any more presumed to be a reactionary cliché to say these things, as it once was in Western liberal intellectual circles. The cliché has now become the dismal, tragic truth. The firm belief, held by generations of intelligent and informed idealists, that justice and equality could be wedded through the ministrations of public servants working with diligent selflessness at control central has come a cropper. It's now obvious that the future simply has not worked -- not for Robert Owen, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Sydney and Beatrice...