by Marketing myopia suggests that businesses will do better in the long-term if they concentrate on meeting the utility of a product or good, rather than just trying to sell their products.
Marketing myopia is the failure & narrow-minded approach of marketing management of a company; which only focuses on certain attributes of the product or service while completely ignoring the long terms goals such as product quality, customers need, demand and satisfaction.
One reason that short-sightedness is so common is that people feel 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 available to estimate future circumstances as best as possible.
There is no such a thing as a growth industry. There are only companies organized and operated to create and capitalize on growth opportunities. There are 4 conditions of the self-deceiving cycle:
- The belief that there is no competitive substitute for the industry’s major product.
- The belief that growth is assured by an expanding and more affluent population.
- Too much faith in mass production and in the advantages of rapidly declining unit costs as output rises.
- Preoccupation with a product that lends itself to carefully controlled scientific experimentation, improvement, and manufacturing cost reduction.
The “New marketing myopia” occurs when marketers fail to see the broader societal context of business decision making, sometimes with disastrous results for their organization and society. It stems from three related phenomena:
(1) A single-minded focus on the customer to the exclusion of other stakeholders.
(2) An overly narrow definition of the customer and his or her needs.
(3) A failure to recognize the changed societal context of business that necessitates addressing multiple stakeholders.
Customers in the “New marketing myopia” remain a central consideration, as in the traditional “Marketing myopia”. However, academics that develop the “new marketing myopia” phenomenon state that it is essential to recognize that other stakeholders also require marketing attention. For business-to-consumer companies, these other stakeholders (e.g., employees) are sometimes customers too, but they need not be (e.g., nontarget market members of the firm’s local community).
Causes of Marketing Myopia
- Failure to Consider Changing Consumer Lifestyle in the Digital Age.
- Concentrating more on products and not on customers.
- Companies suppose there are no competitive substitutes.
- Failing to consider the requirements of the consumer.
Avoiding Marketing Myopia
Over the past half century, marketers have given their advice on how to avoid Marketing Myopia. They primarily focus on the fact that the customer is the most important element in marketing and hence the sole focus should on them. The problem with this approach is that the advice has been taken too seriously thus resulting in a new type of myopia, which may cause deformation in strategic vision and could possibly lead to business failure.
The result of doing so would however lead to other consequences as listed below:
- Narrowly defining the customer’s needs.
- A single-minded focus on the customer could lead to the exclusion of other important people in the organisation like the stakeholders.
- A failure to recognize the changed societal context of business that necessitates addressing multiple stakeholders.
Thus, having an extremely customer scope view is not the solution to this marketing syndrome. The following are the measures which could be adopted to avoid or mitigate the problem:
- Determining stakeholder salience.
- Mapping the company’s stakeholders to show who influences or should influence the company and what issues most concern them.
- Researching the stakeholder issue, their expectations and the measure impact.
- Embedding a stakeholder’s involvement.
- Engage with stakeholders as they are also an integral part of the decision-making process and in most cases fund the particular Programme.
