Theodore Levitt
Born in Germany where his father was a cobbler, Theodore (usually known as Ted) Levitt (1925-2006) emigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of ten. Despite his origins, he was drafted into the US army and served in Europe in the second world war. After the war he gained a PhD in economics from Ohio State University. He was then an academic at Harvard Business School for some 30 years and started teaching marketing there at a time when, legend has it, he had never previously read a book on the subject.
Levitt is famous for two things in particular: an article published in 1960 (“Marketing Myopia”); and his resignation almost 30 years later from the editorship of the publication in which that article first appeared—Harvard Business Review.
The article, written only a year after he had joined the Harvard Business School faculty, can be seen as a turning point in the acceptance and respectability of marketing. It argued that companies had paid too much attention to producing products and too little to satisfying customers. He pointed out, for instance, that the train had lost out to the airplane and the motor car because it thought it was in the business of running trains rather than that of providing customers with transport.
The message may sound old hat now, but it was revolutionary at the time and almost 1m copies of the article were sold in the years since it first appeared. After it, Philip Kotler (see article) could follow with his more intellectually rigorous analysis of marketing and his framework for taking it further. Before it, marketing was about little more than the four Ps: product, price, place and promotion.
Levitt's resignation from Harvard Business Review, which he once described as “a magazine written by people who can't write for people who won't read”, was over an article about women in management. In his four years in the job he had controversially transformed the publication from a dry academic journal to a readable management magazine that featured cartoons. “If people don't read what you write,” he once said, “then what you write is a museum piece.” Some argued that if you raised the price of the magazine in the way that he had done during his editorship then you also risked becoming a museum piece. He was succeeded in the post by the almost equally controversial Rosabeth Moss Kanter (see article).
What I've achieved, I think, is to make myself effective in some way, kept myself intellectually curious, alive and productive, and made myself interesting to myself.
Levitt is sometimes credited with coining the term “globalisation” in a 1983 article, “The Globalisation of Markets”. Although the term had undoubtedly been in use before—the New York Times said it was used in other senses “at least as early as 1944”—it was Levitt who first popularised (marketed?) it as referring to the spread of corporations around the globe.
“Gone are accustomed differences in national or regional preferences,” he said at the time (a view echoed by Thomas Friedman in “The World is Flat” a quarter of a century later), allowing companies like Coca-Cola and McDonald's to sell identical products around the world. It was never a view that received universal acceptance, however. Kotler disagreed with it, as have gurus from a later generation, arguing that regional and national differences remain as crucial as ever, and that companies ignore them at their peril.
Notable publications
“Marketing Myopia”, Harvard Business Review, July–August 1960
“The Marketing Imagination”, Free Press, 1983
“The Globalisation of Markets”, Harvard Business Review, May–June 1983
More management gurus
This profile is adapted from “The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus”, by Tim Hindle (Profile Books; 322 pages; £20). The guide has the low-down on more than 50 of the world's most influential management thinkers past and present and over 100 of the most influential business-management ideas. To buy this book, please visit our online shop.