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B2B Approaches for Different Economic Cycles 129

nesses to look beyond a myopic view of their market and
leverage new opportunities. Marketing myopia is a term
used in marketing as well as the title of an important mar-
keting paper written by Theodore Levitt. This paper was first
published in 1960 in the Harvard Business Review, a journal
of which he was an editor.

Some commentators have suggested that its publication
marked the beginning of the modern marketing movement.
Its theme is that the vision of most organizations is too
constricted by a narrow understanding of what business
they are in. It exhorted CEOs to re-examine their corporate
vision; and redefine their markets in terms of wider perspec-
tives. It was successful in its impact because it was, as with
all of Levitt’s work, essentially practical and pragmatic.
Organizations found that they had been missing opportuni-
ties that were plain to see once they adopted the wider
view. The paper was influential. The oil companies (which
represented one of his main examples in the paper) rede-
fined their business as energy rather than just petroleum,
although Royal Dutch Shell, which embarked upon an
investment program in nuclear power, subsequently regret-
ted this course of action.

One reason that short sightedness is so common is that
people feel that they cannot accurately predict the future.
While this is a legitimate concern, it is also possible to use a
whole range of business prediction techniques currently avail-
able to estimate future circumstances as well as possible.

There is a greater scope for opportunities as the industry
changes. It trains managers to look beyond their current
business activities and think “outside the box”. George
Steiner (1979) claims that if a buggy whip manufacturer
in 1910 defined its business as the “transportation starter
business”, they might have been able to make the creative
leap necessary to move into the automobile business when
technological change demanded it.