Is there a relationship between marketing and environmental impact? How do companies make the decisions that will ultimately determine whether they become responsible corporate citizens, or whether they operate with what can be perceived in hindsight as a supreme disregard for the welfare of their environment? These questions are not directly addressed by Levitt in The Marketing Imagination, but his focus on marketing-driven companies, and on the role that marketing plays in most companies, offers insight.
Levitt holds that many companies suffer from marketing myopia, which is the tendency to perceive the market from too close a perspective to comprehend the larger issues. As an example of this, Levitt cites Henry Ford, who has been celebrated for bringing the assembly line to American industry, which (we are told) enabled him to bring $500 cars to the marketplace. Ford, and Levitt, hold that the market has reversed the importance of Ford's actions. Ford did not set out to cut costs and thus sell millions of cars. Instead, he determined that he could sell millions of cars at the lower price and then set out to find a way to accomplish this (155). That the end result was the assembly line is, according to Levitt, happenstance. If Ford could have brought a $500 car to market by importing it from Canada, for example, he likely would have done that.
This understanding of the market is at the heart of successful companies. However, many companies focus instead on cutting costs and creating demand for products that are neither new nor improved, although they may be touted as such. Without understanding the market, corporate America is becoming myopic because it focuses not on the market, or the consumer, but on the company. Businesses are increasingly run as though the only issue of importance was how effective the production line is, how low costs are, or how much profit a specific segment makes in a specific quarter. Shor...