Obituary

Source: News from McKinsey Quarterly

MARKETING
In the News: A marketing maven

Theodore Levitt, a Harvard Business School professor and marketing expert, died last week. Levitt was perhaps best known for his article "Marketing myopia," in which he advanced the idea that companies often fail because they define themselves too narrowly. He argued, for example, that railroads "let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business instead of the transportation business."