Marketing Myopia

Marketing myopia is unnecessarily common among business people. It is not seeing 'down the road'. Many business people make their decisions based on current circumstances. They do not think about what will likely occur in their industry in the future. One reason that short sightedness is so common is that people feel that they can not accurately predict the future. They are right, of course. But just because we cannot accurately predict the future, that is no reason why we should not use the whole range of business prediction techniques available to us to estimate future circumstances as best we can.

 

Marketing Myopia is the failure to define an organization's purpose in terms of its function from the consumers' point of view. For example, railway companies that define their markets in terms of trains, rather than transportation, fail to recognize the challenge of competition from cars, airlines, and buses. It is therefore necessary to define the needs of the consumer in more general terms rather than product-specific terms. Marketing Myopia is the short sighted look of the managers in wrongly identifying the category and goals of the company, not looking at the whole industry of the product neglecting the fields of opportunities in their area of industry, not listening to the customer's real n