But the growth on your back can be your focus. #getregularcheckups
Is growth good in business? Yes, of course! BUT it can’t be the only thing you focus on, and that has been proven time after time!
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SOURCES https://www.khabirulalam.com/uploads/1/1/7/3/117391517/marketing_myopia_hbr.pdf
https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/marketing/marketing-myopia
https://www.cleanersupply.com/492bff/globalassets/csius/research-reports/2025-state-of-the-dry-cleaning-industry/2025-state-of-the-dry-cleaning-industry.pdf
Mobile Fact Sheet
Picture Source: https://www.instacart.com/company/enterprise-blog/schnucks-expands-caper-carts-to-new-stores-across-missouri-and-illinois
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
So I’m going to make a bold statement, and you can feel free to disagree with me if you want.
There’s no such thing as a growth industry.
Now, obviously, there are industries in which there is growth, and there are new industries that grow very quickly. That much is true! But many businesses and marketers have become trained to think about everything in terms of growth rather than in terms of sustainability.
If you can take something that exists and make it perform better, that’s a success story.
If you can take something that’s declining, correct its weaknesses and get it growing again, that’s another success story.
If you can conjure something out of nothing like a mighty tree growing out of a tiny acorn, that’s such a success story you’ll probably have a great career ahead of you, even if you never actually accomplish that particular feat again.
And I get it. Growth is impressive. It generates interest and excitement and buzz. It brings in money and keeps your sales team busy. It makes you look like you’re really good at marketing.
But here’s the problem. In nature, growth never occurs in a straight line. It’s a curve that will eventually plateau. And when you’re seeing growth, what you’re usually seeing is not success that’s guaranteed to continue going up, up, up! What you’re seeing instead is an undercapitalized market where you’d better get ready for demand to level off, competition to get fiercer, prices to drop and your success story to turn into yet another tale of a brand or product that used to be a big deal… until people moved on to something else.
But don’t take this from me. I learned all of this in my introductory marketing class, the same as any of us should have, when I read the classic paper Marketing Myopia by Theodore “Ted” Levitt, professor emeritus of marketing at the Harvard Business School. And this paper, which was published in 1960, still holds true today and it’s a cautionary tale about what happens when you get so obsessed with growth that you forget that the marketplace is never about what you think customers need.
It’s about what the customers need and want instead.
So let’s walk through this paper and understand how it applies to today!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So Marketing Myopia was written in 1960 and uses the framework of the oil industry, which at the time was really focused on selling petroleum products to consumers. Ted Levitt pointed out that the oil industry was in danger of becoming irrelevant to consumers if the focus continued to be on gasoline and not on the broader need of providing energy.
At the time the paper was written, the United States was still benefitting from a postwar economic boom that allowed many people to find meaningful employment, afford their first automobile and start driving around as a leisure activity.
It’s only natural that oil companies would think of themselves as being an essential part of that lifestyle change and presume that the market for gasoline, which was growing tremendously at the time, would keep going up!
But Levitt points to a few previous industries that made these assumptions and paid a price.
One of them is dry cleaning, which was a major growth industry in the age of wool garments, but which had matured and become stagnant by 1960 and which was also facing irrelevance because new clothing fibers, detergents and cleaning processes were available to make dry cleaning far less essential than it once had been.
Does this mean dry cleaners went away? Not remotely! 66 years later, there are close to 100,000 dry cleaner retail locations in the United States today and most aren’t corporate – according to a report from CleanerSupply.com, about two thirds of dry cleaner owners only have one facility and less than 10% have four stores or more.
It’s still a reasonable line of business for owner-operators to take on and run with their families, and business has been improving for many of them.
But if you’d asked dry cleaners how they were doing five or six years ago, they would have told you a lot of tales of woe, because many of them were dependent on people bringing in work clothes and, during the pandemic, that just wasn’t happening as much because people weren’t going into the office and didn’t need their work clothes dry-cleaned as much.
Those who built their business around dry-cleaning work clothes and uniforms had to find a way to pivot or expand their idea of what their business ought to be doing.
Ted Levitt would say, “the need a dry cleaner is serving is not to apply a dry cleaning process, but to provide a cleaning service for fabrics.”
And indeed, that’s how a lot of them pivoted in the decades after this paper was published, expanding their services to include laundry, specialized cleaning techniques and services like pick-up and delivery.
But here’s another problem. Dry cleaning is a service business, and when service isn’t good, people go elsewhere.
The report I just mentioned also suggests that many owners are nearing retirement age and that only half of them work 50 or fewer hours a week, with 25% working 60 or more hours.
Many of them are not planning on investing in service, but in equipment.
The report also reveals that more than half of owners don’t believe in spending money on marketing, which means that they’re relying on word of mouth about their services as they’re getting older and less personally capable of serving the customers as well. That’s just not sustainable, and they’re positioning themselves for failure once more.
I expect the industry will see another major decline as the desire or need for dry cleaning continues to drop among younger consumers.
Let’s look at another of Ted Levitt’s examples of marketing myopia, and that’s grocery stores.
As he references in the article, in the 1930s, the first supermarkets began appearing and started threatening corner stores, which were the dominant retail model for selling food at the time.
The corner stores prided themselves on convenience and personal connection to the community and could not envision a world in which people would drive past them, perhaps for many miles, to go to a supermarket.
And when supermarkets began to grow in popularity, it was attributed to novelty, not their business model.
We all know what happened. The corner stores had to evolve or wither away, and Levitt notes in the article that those who stuck to “the courage of their convictions” and continued running corner stores “lost their shirts” in the process.
Consumers didn’t want or need the corner store experience anymore and they were also tired of paying higher prices, having more limited selection and having to shop at multiple places to get what they needed.
Supermarkets filled the need of one-stop shopping, and they were also well-suited to the emerging lifestyle of owning a car.
Supermarkets became so dominant that they themselves are now under threat by different models that reflect modern day consumer wants and needs.
The most obvious is online shopping, which continues to cut into supermarket business and forces them to offer their own platforms and services for online orders, drive-up pickup and delivery.
But they’re also threatened by big box retailers like Walmart and Target, who ran many struggling chains out of business, as well as discount private label retailers like Aldi and Trader Joe’s and dollar store chains like Dollar General and Dollar Tree.
And then there are prepared food services, quick-service restaurants with value menus to promote more regular patronage and warehouse clubs like Costco and Sam’s Club.
And so supermarkets, too, can become victims of marketing myopia if they get stuck in remembering the “good old days” and don’t remain relevant by serving consumer wants and needs.
That’s exactly why you see major grocery chains experimenting with high-tech shopping tools, adopting dynamic price tags, rolling out app-based rewards programs and using stock counting robots to alert staff when shelves need attention.
Levitt argues in the article that the mistake these industries and others like them have made is believing that they are growth industries that will always be buoyed by population growth, competitive advantage, economies of scale and advances in cost-cutting.
Here’s a really important quote from the article itself.
In truth, there is no such thing as a growth industry, I believe. There are only companies organized and operated to create and capitalize on growth opportunities. Industries that assume themselves to be riding some automatic growth escalator invariably descend into stagnation. The history of every dead and dying “growth” industry shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay.
There are four conditions that usually guarantee this cycle:
1. The belief that growth is assured by an expanding and more affluent population;
2. The belief that there is no competitive substitute for the industry’s major product;
3. Too much faith in mass production and in the advantages of rapidly declining unit costs as output rises;
4. Preoccupation with a product that lends itself to carefully controlled scientific experimentation, improvement, and manufacturing cost reduction.
Does this sound like any industry you can think of? I could probably name a dozen off the top of my head that are all falling victim to this sort of thinking right now!
One of the most recent has been the smartphone industry, which went through a rapid adoption and growth phase as the technology improved and justified upgrades, but which is now stagnant with little opportunity for change because 91% of all adults in the United States own a smartphone now, comparable to many other developed nations, and there’s limited growth in the developing world for anything but low-end commodity products.
Tablets and smartwatches were supposed to have a similar adoption curve if you listened to tech execs, but they dropped off quickly because people didn’t want or need them the same way they wanted a smartphone.
And smartphone makers got caught up in such a race to stop making cheaper, less durable phones that required annual upgrades and to instead focus on creating high-value flagship devices that they’re now seeing many people decline to upgrade as often as they used to and more content to just stick with the phone they have.
Consumers also don’t get excited about upgrading their phones anymore; they’re annoyed because it’s disruptive to their lives and they have to purchase new accessories and reset all their preferences.
The marketing myopia framework suggests that smartphone makers won’t see that kind of growth again unless they can anticipate a different consumer want and need and then be ready to serve it.
In fact, Ted Levitt suggests that this is essentially what growth is – not something conjured out of thin air, but unrealized market potential that’s being capitalized on until you reach a saturation point.
So let’s consider the oil industry. Ted Levitt suggested that the oil companies shift to thinking about themselves as energy companies, and many actually did! When they only thought of themselves as makers of kerosine to power gas lamps, they were vulnerable to electricity’s disruptive influence.
But when they thought about themselves as providing the energy needed to improve lifestyles in dark places or during twilight hours, they were better-situated to serve an actual need.
Likewise, when oil companies focused too much on gasoline and cars, they were vulnerable to situations like the gas crisis in the 1970s when demand far exceeded supply and consumers began looking for alternatives to driving.
But if they were invested in providing energy more broadly, they could face that change and still serve customers’ wants and needs.
One area where the energy sector and automotive industry tried very hard to keep consumer needs from being fulfilled was in providing working electric cars.
That industry is booming today, but many of the manufacturers leading the way aren’t based in the United States. It’s likely that the US will be over reliant on more expensive and environmentally problematic fossil fuel powered cars as other parts of the world primarily utilize electric vehicles.
Consumers who want inexpensive, reliable electric vehicles will likely import them, and the losers will be the companies who were too focused on preserving what worked here and now and not on what might be the needs of consumers tomorrow.
One more thought I want to leave you with comes directly from the article, and it’s on the interaction between the customer and the product.
Let us start at the beginning: the customer. It can be shown that motorists strongly dislike the bother, delay, and experience of buying gasoline. People actually do not buy gasoline. They cannot see it, taste it, feel it, appreciate it, or really test it.
What they buy is the right to continue driving their cars. The gas station is like a tax collector to whom people are compelled to pay a periodic toll as the price of using their cars. This makes the gas station a basically unpopular institution. It can never be made popular or pleasant, only less unpopular, less unpleasant.
That’s the essence of Marketing Myopia. It’s a brilliant piece that really holds up. It’s required reading in my marketing class and it’s not going to cease being relevant anytime soon.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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