Marketing - The Retro Revolution

Stephen Brown

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780761968511, 9780761968504
• eBook ISBN: 9781446232309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

`the finest writer in our field today? - Journal of Marketing

`the great heretic? - Retrospectives in Marketing

`the most devastating critic of the academic discipline of marketing ever likely to be encountered? - Service Industries Journal

`a jewel in the crown of the academic marketing establishment? - Marketing Intelligence and Planning

`remarkably entertaining? - Public Library Journal

`dazzling erudition? - European Journal of Marketing

`instant classic? - Journal of Marketing Management

· Has marketing moved from `new and improved? to `as good as always??

· Is old the new `new??

Retro-marketing is all around us, whether it be retro-products like the neo-Beetle, retro-scapes, such as Niketown, or retro-advertising campaigns, which make the most of the advertiser?s glorious heritage.

The rise of retro has led many to conclude that it represents the end of marketing, that it is indicative of inertia, ossification and the waning of creativity. Marketing - The Retro Revolution explains why the opposite is the case, demonstrating that retro-orientation is a harbinger of change and a revolution in marketing thinking.

In his engaging and lively style, Stephen Brown shows that the implications of today?s retro revolution are much more profound than the existing literature suggests. He argues that just as retro-marketing practitioners are looking to the past for inspiration, so students, consultants and academics should seek to do likewise.

History reveals that new ideas often come wrapped in old packaging. Marketing - the Retro Revolution unwraps this retro-package and, in doing so, offers radically new ideas for the future of the field.

PART I

PUTTING THE ‘CON’ INTO CONCEPT

2

Reviewing Marketing: The Defective Vision of Theodore Levitt

It is a truth universally acknowledged that ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’ is the most compelling opening line in English Literature. Some bookworms, admittedly, might plump for ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’ and others doubtless set great store by ‘Call me Ishmael’, ‘A spectre is stalking Europe’ or ‘It was a bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen’.¹ But few would deny that Jane Austen’s opening salvo in Pride and Prejudice is extremely hard to beat. So much so, that the unspeakable people who pontificate on matters of literary style invariably introduce their self-important thoughts with a contrived variation on Austen’s incomparable inaugural sentence.²

Have they no originality?

If, of course, an analogous Rhetorical Assessment Exercise were performed on the marketing literature, it is a truth universally acknowledged that there’d be very few contenders for the ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged’ title. Marketers, after all, are not exactly renowned for their literary acumen, nor do they claim to be. Most scholarly publications start with those sturdy, albeit less than stirring, words ‘This paper’ or, when they’re really pushing the philosophical boat out, ‘The purpose of this paper’. Writers targeting the practitioner market, furthermore, consistently commence with a corporate parable of the ‘Joe Doe faced a difficult situation’ variety. Happily, the organization – sometimes real, often fictional, always stricken – is unfailingly saved thanks to the wonder-working power of the modern marketing concept. Praise the Lord and pass the mess of 4Ps potage.³

Regrettably ubiquitous though such introductory banalities, barbarities and bromides undoubtedly are, marketing possesses at least one opening line of real literary merit. It is ‘Every major industry was once a growth industry’ by the superlative Ted Levitt, stalwart of Harvard Business School and one of the greatest marketing gurus of all time.⁴ Although Levitt produced many other arresting pipe-openers and textual throat-clearers in the course of his glittering career – ‘Greed is boring’, ‘Never leave well enough alone’ and ‘There is no such thing as a commodity’ spring immediately to mind – none quite attain the sublimity of ‘Every major industry’. It is succinct (eight words, many monosyllabic). It is bold (a statement of ostensible fact). It is aphoristic (easily remembered, eminently quotable). It is intriguing (curiously downbeat, the antithesis of marketing boosterism). It is anthropomorphic (imputes fallible human qualities to an inanimate object). It is allusive (shades of Arnold Toynbee, Oswald Spengler, Henry George and Edward Gibbon on the rise and fall of civilizations). It is almost biblical in its inalienability (in the beginning was the word, as it were). Most importantly of all, it is retro. It combines past and present to brilliant stylistic effect and, as the very first line of a 12-page paper, it intimates that a major statement about the future of marketing is about to unfold. Like Nietzsche, that most literary of philosophers, Levitt grabs his readers by the metaphorical lapels, shakes them vigorously and dares them not to read the rest of ‘Marketing Myopia’.

Few, it appears, have refused to take the Ted Levitt challenge, since ‘Marketing Myopia’ is perhaps the most famous paper in the entire marketing literature.⁵ It has been anthologized on numerous occasions, cited on countless more, dissected in virtually every principles of marketing seminar and, akin to directors’ cuts of influential Hollywood movies, it has even been reflected on and added to by the author himself.⁶ It was recognized as an instant classic at the time of publication (lead article in a leading journal, given the special this-is-sure-to-provecontroversial-read-it-at-your-peril editorial treatment,⁷ winner of the prestigious McKinsey Award for the best paper in Harvard Business Review that year) and subsequent decades have only served to increase its standing. At more than half a million copies sold, ‘Marketing Myopia’ is by far the best-selling HBR reprint of all time. What’s more, it launched Levitt’s career as marketing’s foremost spokesperson, a position he continues to hold notwithstanding the competitive onslaughts of Philip Kotler, Tom Peters and all the rest. Certainly, he is the only marketing person, alongside Kotler, routinely referred to in management primers, synopses and anthologies.⁸ To many nonmarketers, he represents the voice, the personification, the embodiment of the modern marketing concept. To many marketers, moreover, he is the field’s foremost thinker of the century just past and most would agree that ‘Marketing Myopia’ is his greatest thought.

This does not mean, of course, that Theodore Levitt is some kind of intellectual one-hit wonder. On the contrary, his 1986 volume The Marketing Imagination has been translated into no fewer than eleven languages and was recently reprinted with the addition – naturally – of ‘Marketing Myopia’.⁹ Another anthology, Innovation in Marketing, won the annual Academy of Management award for best business book (again, it included his greatest hit)¹⁰ and he has had more papers published in HBR than any other management guru, acquiring four McKinsey Awards along the way.¹¹ At the same time, however, it is true to say that the sheer brilliance of ‘Marketing Myopia’ tends to overshadow the remainder of Levitt’s literary oeuvre. Just as western philosophy is often described as a series of footnotes to Plato, so too modern marketing is a series of errata slips inserted into Ted’s bravura contribution. It is salutary to think that it has probably been read, inwardly digested and acted upon by more practitioners, academicians and students alike than any other article in the history of our field. The so-called ‘modern’ marketing concept effectively began with ‘Marketing Myopia’ and one suspects that the paper will continue to occupy pride of place until such time as it is tackled head-on and treated as a work of historical literature, rather than a compelling call to marketing arms.

When Levitt’s masterpiece is examined from a historiographic perspective, several interesting issues arise. The first of these is that he got it completely wrong. Apart from outright factual errors in the historical overview, such as his misrepresentation of railroads marketing,¹² Theo’s confident predictions concerning rocket-powered cars, ultrasonics, fuel cells, the end of the oil industry by 1985, etc., all proved sadly mistaken.¹³ It is, of course, the easiest thing in the world to take past futurologists to task, since hindsight – unlike marketing – is not myopic. In theory at least. Yet it says much for Levitt’s literary ability that neither his historical misrepresentations nor his failings on the futurology front seem to have affected readers’ acceptance of the accompanying conceptual contentions. True, he has received a bit of a pasting in the strategic management literature,¹⁴ and at least one indigenous cynic has pounced on Levitt’s flawed forecasts to dismiss the paper as a whole, describing them as ‘the buggy-whip manufacturers, the railroad companies, the Hollywood studios of marketing discourse’.¹⁵ Such is Levitt’s rhetorical brilliance, nevertheless, that most readers seem content to overlook the article’s errors of fact and method, or simply fail to infer that his conceptual argument might be as suspect as his prognostications. Levitt may not be much of a medium, but his message transcends space and time. Almost.

Another intriguing feature of ‘Marketing Myopia’ is that it is mistitled. So much so, the paper is well nigh prosecutable under the Trade Descriptions Act. Now, this is not to suggest that it is badly titled. On the contrary, the root metaphor of ‘Marketing Myopia’ is undeniably arresting. Not only is it based on the oracular trope that has characterized western philosophy since Descartes,¹⁶ if not before, but by suggesting that organizational failure is attributable to visual impairment, to an inability to see clearly, to a short-sighted focus on the product offer rather than the customer benefits thereby obtained, Levitt coined a conceptual conceit that calls down the years like none other. Myopia, indeed, has become the ultimate term of abuse within marketing discourse – a six-letter four-letter word, as it were – since being described as ‘myopic’ is tantamount to being deemed anti-marketing, anti-business, anti-American. Nevertheless, the merest glance at ‘Marketing Myopia’ reveals that the visual metaphor barely features in the body of the paper itself. Despite its admittedly brilliant title, there is a complete lack of visual imagery in ‘Marketing Myopia’. Incredible as it sounds, the piece is primarily predicated on aural analogies (‘If you had told them sixty years ago’, ‘a nation of production-orientated business managers refuses to hear the great lesson he taught’, ‘it was not a discussible subject, or an askable question’, ‘yet the automobile companies do not seem to listen’.) So marked is the aural metaphor that it should really be called ‘Marketing Misheard’.

Metaphor, as the prominent literary critic Roman Jakobson reminds us, may be a very powerful figure of speech, but it is not the only one. Metonymy, where the part stands for the whole, is equally important.¹⁷ In this respect, it is striking that Levitt’s article is best known for its myopia metaphor yet the paper itself is predominantly metonymical. That is to say, the author presents each of his highly specific, historically contingent company vignettes as exemplars for businesses and managers as a whole. What’s more, he considers the idiosyncratic contents of a single issue of a single trade magazine, the American Petroleum Institute Quarterly, to be indicative of the production-orientation ethos of an entire industry and, by metonymical extension, of industry per se.¹⁸ He contends that his three calamitous case studies contain lessons for all companies, in all places, at all times (by any stretch of the imagination, this is an incredible stretch of the imagination). Levitt himself, moreover, performs in an essentially metonymic capacity insofar as ‘Marketing Myopia’ is the epitome of his entire literary corpus. As all of his signature textual stratagems – wordplay, hyperbole, humour, etc. – are on display in the paper, ‘Marketing Myopia’ is to Theodore Levitt what Theodore Levitt is to marketing as a whole.

Après myopia le déluge.

Whatever its metonymical merits, the (metaphorical) bottom line is that the root metaphor of ‘Marketing Myopia’ is itself astigmatic, not to say dangerously defective. For Levitt, the fundamental mistake of Hollywood studios was that they considered themselves to be in the movie business rather than the entertainment business. The railroads, likewise, ran into the buffers because they failed to appreciate that they were in transportation, not tracks. The oil companies, similarly, didn’t supply petrol but power, consumers wanted quarter-inch holes not electric drills, perfumers sold hope not fragrance, coffee drinkers quaffed liquid refreshment not dilute-to-taste caffeine and, last but not least, ‘the organisation must learn to think of itself not as producing goods and services but as buying customers’.¹⁹

While few would deny that it is senior management’s duty to think about strategic issues – about what business their business is in – Levitt’s laudable desire to avoid myopia brings with it the dangers of longsightedness, of marketing hyperopia.²⁰ These include excessive diversification, unnecessary acquisitions, corporate sclerosis and the ruinous consequences of not ‘sticking to the knitting’, as Levitt’s latter-day bête noire once described it.²¹ The rise of specialist coffee vendors like Starbucks and Aroma suggests that many people require something more specific than liquid refreshment. It is by no means certain that any fragrance will do – anyone for Old Spice? – or any power tool, or sneakers, or blue jeans, or hamburger, or hi-fi, or automobile, or whatever. Indeed, if any motor car suffices why aren’t we all driving rejectedby-focus-groups Rover 75s, or Ford any-colour-you-want Kas, or Neo what-colour-do-you-dream-in Beetles? Hollywood survived, surely, as much by its renewed commitment to making good movies, improving customer service (multiplexes, Dolby stereo, catering) and exploiting ancillary markets (videos, memorabilia, soundtracks), as it did by considering itself to be in the entertainment business, whatever that is exactly. To put it another way, is attending a performance of Taming of the Shrew really analogous, as Levitt would have us believe, to sitting at home watching Ten Things I Hate About You on DVD? The plots are identical, I grant you, but Ten Things has scene selection, soundtrack excerpts, the theatrical trailer and a blissful lack of talking, coughing, sweet-sucking people, whose heads always get in the way.²²

Little, admittedly, is gained by lacerating Levitt for his shortsightedness – in truth, there is much to be said for myopia, the narrowness of vision that is oft-times necessary for commercial success – since the real astigmatism surrounding ‘Marketing Myopia’ is not Levitt’s. It’s ours. We, the cockeyed readership, have either failed to see, or simply overlooked, the infirmities of Theo’s argument. In the kingdom of the blind the myopic marketing man may be king, but we must bear some responsibility for preferring not to see our emperor’s intellectual nakedness (pardon my parable plundering promiscuity). The brutal truth is that we choose not to notice Levitt’s conceptual décolletage because he tells us what we want to hear, what we want to believe. Principally, that marketing is the be all and end all of management, that companies must be marketing orientated otherwise failure is certain, that marketing is a universal verity, relevant to all places, all times, all organizations. Levitt may not have been the first to portray marketing as the philosopher’s stone of management but his unparalleled powers of persuasion – his scholarly salesmanship, his cerebral chutzpah, his retro rhetoric, if you will – guaranteed that future generations of marketers would apply his prescription to the discipline itself. Marketing must not be myopic. Marketing must not be blinkered, bound, bashful, bettered. Marketing must.

Forty years have now passed since Levitt’s inextinguishable exegesis and, as marketing stumbles around trying desperately to orient itself in a world where everyone is marketing-led, or claims to be, and there aren’t any organizational apostates who have yet to see the light, it is clear that the discipline has been completely blinded by Father Ted’s stylistic brilliance. Indeed, the ultimate achievement of ‘Marketing Myopia’ is that it conveys the impression of timelessness, that it is speaking the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is nothing less than the gospel according to St Theodore, which if truly believed in and acted upon, will not only ensure worldly success but a much-prized place in the paradisal marketing hereafter. The concluding paragraphs in particular read like a cross between the imprecations of an Old Testament prophet, the histrionics of a hellfire-and-brimstone evangelist and, not least, neo-Nietzschean bombast of the God-is-dead-long-live-God variety.

Although ‘Marketing Myopia’ continues to give the impression of imperishability, the philologists, hermeneuts and archaeologists of knowledge amongst us will readily appreciate that it was very much an artefact of its time. Just as the abstruse post-structuralist theorist, Paul de Man, maintains that blindness affords insight, since what we ignore is as important as what we examine,²³ so too the ultimate form of marketing myopia concerns ‘Marketing Myopia’. Generally speaking, we have been so mesmerized by its gratifyingly flattering message that we’ve failed to see that it was written at a particular point in time, in a specific historical setting and dealt with important issues of immediate concern. In order to grasp the contemporary significance of ‘Marketing Myopia’, it is necessary to appreciate its historical context.

It is no exaggeration to state that the 1950s have acquired a kind of Pleasantvillesque lustre. They are regarded as an Edenic era, a bygone black and whit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Recuperating Marketing: Preface
• Introduction: Looking Back to See Ahead
• Part I: Putting The ‘Con’ Into Concept
• Part II: Downsizing Strategy
• Part III: Fixing The Mix
• Conclusion: Trapping the Substance
• Rewriting Marketing: Pedagogic Appendix
• Reciting Marketing: Notes and References
• Index