Theodore Levitt (1925-2006)

Theodore Levitt, who transformed the world of modern marketing, passed away last month at the age of 81.

Levitt’s groundbreaking manifesto Marketing Myopia, originally published in 1960, disputed the idea that slow growth in some industries was a result of market saturation. Instead, Levitt cited a “failure of management” as the culprit. He suggested that businesses endangered their futures by defining themselves too narrowly.

He noted that the railroad companies, for example, "let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business instead of the transportation business."

Levitt wrote and lectured on marketing “intangibles,” differentiation, and he coined the term “globalization of markets” in the 1980s.

In addition to writing eight books on marketing, Levitt authored twenty-five articles for The Harvard Business Review, which puts him next to the late Peter Drucker as the most prolific contributor to the magazine.

Levitt published a collection of his most influential essays in The Marketing Imagination, which should have a spot in every marketer’s library.

Though he is gone, Levitt's legacy lives on.