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The Marketing Imagination
by Theodore Levitt
Product Group: Book
Publisher: The Free Press (1983-10-01)
ISBN: 0029188407
EAN: 9780029188408
Hardcover: 203 pages
SKU: M130623
Condition: New
Comments: 0029188407 Book free of markings. Cover shows very minimal shelf wear. This book shows no evidence of having been used; gift quality, pretty. Your book will be carefully protected for transit in sturdy, weather-resistant packaging. We are prompt, efficient, communicative.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
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.
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Customer Reviews
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A great book
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-12-05
A great book with all the topics still relevant to today's practice after so many years of publication.
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Too Out-of-date to Be Useful
Rating  (2)
Date: 2007-07-28
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
This book may have been useful when it first came out 25 years ago but it is too dated to be applicable today. While I often find gems of information in older books, this doesn't happen to be one of them. Save your money or buy it used.
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Marketing Myopia
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-08-22
4 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
1. The purpose of business is to create and keep customers. Market myopia is a corporate conscious raising experience designed to narrowly direct all energies at satisifying the customer. Marketing is providing what the buyer wants and marketing's purpose is too keep the customer. Selling is mass producing a product. The value is the asset and the asset value is the capacity for it too generate revenue. Selling focuses on production and packaging.
2. To do that you have to produce and deliver goods and services that people want and value at prices and under conditions that are reasonably attractive relative to those offered by others to a proportion of customer large enough to make those prices and conditions possible. (Set a price people will buy at and let production efficiency drive down cost)
3. To continue to do that, the enterprise must produce revenue in excess of costs in sufficient quantity and with sufficient regularity to attract and hold investors in the enterprise, and must keep at least abreast and some ahead of competitive offerings.
In setting your company goal, always set the standard in terms of production volume, profit, and expanded stockholder equity. Never state them in terms of market factors, customer need fulfillment, customer service objectives, or market targets.
4. No enterprise, no matter how small, can do any of this by mere instinct or accident. It has to clarify its purposes, strategies, and plans, and the larger the enterprise the greater the necessity that these be clearly written down, clearly communicated, and frequently reviewed by the senior members of the enterprise.
Market Imagination. Nothing drives imagination like imagination. Imagination starts things going and work makes it happen. Marketing imagination is the starting point of success in marketing. Marketing brings understanding about customers customs and their problems. Marketing provides a means to capture their attention and their customs. Businesses need to findout what problems people are trying too solve. Differentiation represents an imaginative response to the existence of potential customers in such a way as to give them compelling reasons to want to do business with the originating supplier. Marketing provides deeper understanding of consumer behavior. Marketing means asking the customer to do something different than they normally do. The discovery of the simple essence is the essence of marketing imagination. Imagination means constructing a mental picture of what is or not actually present and what has never been actually experienced. Imagination involves intellectual and artistic inventiveness. It means discoverying why customers prefer your product over a competitor and emphasizing the differences through marketing to new customers and existing customers. The essence of competition is providing something different and providing it better than your competitor. These differences weighin strong with customers than price.
Every major industry was once a growth industry. Failure is at the top. One after One company products were runaway substitutes for the products they replaced. The self deceiving cycle includes four factors: 1. The belief that growth is assured by an expanding and more affluent population. 2. The belief that there is no competitive substitute 3. Too much faith in mass production and in the advantages of rapidly declining unit prices as output rises 4. a preoccupation with a product.
5. In all cases there must be an appropriate system of rewards, audits, and controls to assure that what's intended get properly done and, when not, that its quickly rectified.
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A timeless classic
Rating (5)
Date: 2004-06-18
6 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
Though it was first released in 1983, I still do not believe there is a better book on marketing that The Marketing Imagination. It's not a "marketing fad of the week" kind of book, but rather a practically worded treatise on basic concepts that are more often than not overlooked or ignored by those who chase fads and wonder why they're not more successful. Chapter 4, "Differentiation---of Anything" should be tatooed on the forehead of every marketer.
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Outdated, lacks substance, dwells on marketing basics
Rating (2)
Date: 2003-07-04
8 out of 15 customers found this reveiw helpful
I bought this book based one some of the reviews on this site. Unfortunately, this time they failed me. The book is outdated (as it was published 20 years ago) and lacks substance. If you have little or no knowledge of marketing, this might be a decent intro for you. It is relatively easy to read and dwells on few main concepts. However, if you have taken a marketing course in college or have read much on marketing, you will likely find this book dull and uninformative, as I did. Many of the big revelations in the book seem to me to be common sense. Maybe 20 years ago it was revolutionary, but somehow I doubt it. Also, some of the arguments he makes early in the book have been proven wrong by history...All in all, I would probably avoid this book. I was hoping to get some new insights, but this book sure didn't help. If you must buy it, buy a used copy as it certainly isn't worth [the money].
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