Theodore Levitt Quotes

Theodore Levitt was a German American economist and a professor at the Harvard Business School. He was editor of the Harvard Business Review, noted for increasing the Review's circulation and popularizing the term globalization. In 1983, he proposed a definition for corporate purpose: "Rather than merely making money, it is to create and keep a customer". Wikipedia

✵ 1. March 1925 – 28. June 2006

Theodore Levitt: 8 quotes1 like

Famous Theodore Levitt Quotes

“The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller; marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert his product into cash; marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering and finally consuming it.”

Theodore Levitt

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 10

“Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things. The difference speaks for itself. Yet the fluent advisers to business seldom make the distinction. They tend to rate ideas more by their novelty than by their practicability.”

Theodore Levitt

Theodore Levitt (1974). Marketing for business growth, p. 71

“Every major industry was once a growth industry. But some that are now riding a wave of growth enthusiasm are very much in the shadow of decline. Others, which are thought of as seasoned growth industries, have actually stopped growing. In every case the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management.”

Theodore Levitt

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 1; Lead paragraph

“People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.”

Theodore Levitt

Theodore Levitt, cited in: Clayton Christensen (2016), The Clayton M. Christensen Reader. p. 46

“I do not mean that selling is ignored. Far from it. But selling, again, is not marketing. As already pointed out, selling concerns it with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariably does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse, and satisfy customer needs. The customer is somebody "out there" who, with proper cunning, can be separated from his loose change.”

Theodore Levitt

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 19

“The historic fate of one growth industry after another has been its suicidal product provincialism.”

Theodore Levitt

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 15

“In business, the followers are the customers. To produce these customers, the entire corporation must be viewed as a customer-creating and customer satisfying organism. Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer creating value satisfactions. It must push this idea (and everything it means and requires) into every nook and cranny of the organization.”

Theodore Levitt

Source: Marketing Myopia, 1960, p. 20-21

“The business of business is profits.”

Theodore Levitt

Source: The Dangers of Social Responsibility (Levitt, 1958).

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