Marketing Giant Ted Levitt Remembered
SCHOLAR, WRITER, TEACHER: Levitt, in a photo from 1983. His research tranformed the study and practice of marketing.
Photo by RICHARD CHASE
The HBS community lost a legendary member of its faculty June 28 when marketing expert Theodore (“Ted”) Levitt died at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, after a long illness. He was 81 years old.
Levitt taught thousands of HBS students during his tenure at the School from 1959 to 1990. A scholar of international renown, he changed the way marketing was studied and practiced in business. In the 1960 Harvard Business Review article “Marketing Myopia,” he asked managers this simple question: “What business are you in?” As an example of marketing myopia he cited railroads that “let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business instead of the transportation business.”
“When Levitt articulated that, it was fresh, and now it is a standard piece of the litany of management practice,” HBS professor emeritus Stephen A. Greyser told the Boston Globe. “He wanted to be lively, he wanted to be provocative, but most of all, he wanted the power of the ideas to come through.” Over forty years after its publication, “Marketing Myopia” has sold more than 850,000 reprints, making it one of the best-selling HBR articles of all time.
In 1983, Levitt penned another classic with the HBR article “The Globalization of Markets.” Besides popularizing the word “globalization,” he asserted that new technologies had “proletarianized” communication, transportation, and travel, creating a new commercial reality. He argued that the future belonged not to the multinational corporation but to the global corporation that did not cater to local differences.
Known for his dedication to rewriting articles again and again, Levitt brought the same level of editorial acumen to his role as editor of HBR, a position he held from 1985 to 1989. “If people don’t read what you write,” he often said, “then what you write is a museum piece.”
Levitt had a memorable style in the classroom, tossing chalk at the blackboard as well as at unsuspecting students. In the September 2004 Bulletin, Bill Dunaway (MBA ’64) recalled his first experience with Levitt: “We were all anxious to talk and make a good first impression. I held my hand up until it had gangrene. Then Ted Levitt ate me alive. I used some marketing buzzwords, and he got right in my face and made me define them. It was his way of saying, ‘Don’t bring book knowledge in here. Bring your experience.’ He was a dynamic, dramatic, and damn good professor, very well loved and respected.”
“I think more than anything else he loved teaching,” his son Peter told the Boston Globe. “He loved the exchange of ideas. He loved seeing young people who were eager to learn.”
Levitt was born in 1925 in Vollmerz, Germany, and moved with his family to Dayton, Ohio, a decade later to escape the encroaching Nazi threat. Drafted into the U.S. Army before he finished high school, Levitt served in Europe during World War II. At the end of the war, he returned to Dayton and a job as a sportswriter at the Dayton Journal Herald, where he helped humorist Erma Bombeck get her start at the paper. He earned his high-school diploma through a correspondence course and enrolled at Antioch College, receiving his BA in 1949. Two years later, he earned a doctorate in economics from Ohio State University. Levitt is survived by his wife of 58 years, the former Joan Levy, four children, and six grandchildren, as well as two sisters.
To read more about Ted Levitt and his contributions, visit www.hbs.edu/news/062906_levittobit.html.
