Great Throughts Treasury

"The discovery of the simple essence of things is the essence of the marketing imagination? Theodore Levitt, The Marketing Imagination (Excerpt) 2 of 8 Imagination means to construct mental pictures of what is or is not actually present, what has never been actually experienced. To exercise the imagination is to be creative. It requires intellectual or artistic inventiveness. Anybody can do it, and most people often do ? unfortunately, however, only in daydreams and fantasies, when they are not constrained by convention or conviction. To do it in business requires shedding these constraints but also discipline, especially the discipline of dissociation from what exists and what has been. It usually requires combining disparate facts or ideas into new amalgamations of meanings."

"The earth is flat ? What is striking today are the underlying similarities of what is happening now ? (they) form an overwhelming, predominant commonality everywhere."

"The global corporation operates with resolute constancy ? at low relative cost ? as if the entire world (or major regions of it) were a single entity; it sells the same things in the same way everywhere. ? (It) contrasts powerfully with the aging multinational corporation. ? (it) accepts for better or for worse that technology drives consumers relentlessly toward the same common goals ? alleviation of life?s burdens and the expansion of discretionary time and spending power."

"The marketing imagination is the starting point of success in marketing. It is distinguished from other forms of imagination by the unique insights it brings to understanding customers, their problems, and the means to capture their attention and their custom. By asserting that people don't buy things but buy solutions to problems, the marketing imagination makes an inspired leap from the obvious to the meaningful. "Meaning" resides in its implied suggestion as to what to do ? in this case find out what problems people are trying to solve. It is represented by Charles Revson's famous distinction regarding the business of Revlon: 'In the factory we make cosmetics. In the store we sell hope.' It is characterized by Leo McGinneva's famous clarification about why people buy quarter-inch drill bit: 'They don't want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.' It leads to Professor Raymond A. Bauer's famous point that when buyers select a known vendor or known brand over another it is more meaningful to think of the choice as an act of risk reduction rather than as the expression of a brand preference."

"The oil industry is a stunning example of how science, technology, and mass production can divert an entire group of companies from their main task. ... No oil company gets as excited about the customers in its own backyard as about the oil in the Sahara Desert. ... But the truth is, it seems to me, that the industry begins with the needs of the customer for its products. From that primal position its definition moves steadily back stream to areas of progressively lesser importance until it finally comes to rest at the search for oil."

"The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going."

"The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money."

"There is no such thing as growth industries, only companies that take advantage of growth opportunities."

"To be successful a strategy must also be simple, clear, and expressible in only a few written lines. If it is elaborate and complex, and takes a lot of space or time to communicate, few people will understand it or march to its tune. Complexity tends usually to mask a vague or unsubstantial sense of the realities that face the enterprise. The most dramatic and visible realities that so obviously destroy companies are usually fiscal: insufficient cash flow to finance debt and interest payments, to pay vendors, and the like. These usually make the headlines, because they lead so often and so obviously to bankruptcy. Often they are due to wrong decisions about purely financial affairs. Most commonly such wrong decisions are based on miscalculations or plain dumb assumptions about the market place ? that sales would be sufficiently good, prices sufficiently high, accounts receivable sufficiently low and short-term. Hence, fiscal failure originates in the market place."

"To survive, they themselves will have to plot the obsolescence of what now produces their livelihood."

"What should be done can be defined only by reference to what customers do, can do, or might do in the market place. No amount of imagination can bail out companies intent on inappropriate purposes. The history of all succeeding and successful companies is a history of right purposes at the right times, executed with means right for their situations. Nor is selecting growth sectors on which to concentrate company efforts a solution to the problem of stagnation. A lot of other companies are likely to have hit on the same target opportunities. The trick is to know how to convert opportunity into disproportionately opportune results. This means getting an edge over the other competitors? The trick is to combine price competitiveness with competitiveness in all other respects. In short, the trick is to provide the most competitive value? Business success is a matter of the disproportionate and enduring attraction of certain proportions of customers at certain enduring levels of relative price. Most significantly, it is a story that defines the purpose of business in terms of marketing ? once again, getting and keeping customers. This therefore installs marketing at the center of what's done in corporate strategic planning."