Theodore Levitt Quotes

As legendary Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt put it, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

The true purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer, not to make you money.

The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going.

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.

Harvard’s Theodore Levitt states the case as well as anyone else: The trouble with much of the advice business gets today about the need to be more vigorously creative is that its advocates often fail to distinguish between creativity and innovation. Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things…. A powerful new idea can kick around unused in a company for years, not because its merits are not recognized, but because nobody has assumed the responsibility for converting it from words into action. Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is only in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo. If you talk to the people who work for you, you’ll discover that there is no shortage of creativity or creative people in American business. The shortage is of innovators. All too often, people believe that creativity automatically leads to innovation. It doesn’t. Creative people tend to pass the responsibility for getting down to brass tacks to others. They are the bottleneck. They make none of the right kind of effort to help their ideas get a hearing and a try…. The fact that you can put a dozen inexperienced people in a room and conduct a brainstorming session that produces exciting new ideas shows how little relative importance ideas themselves have…. Idea men constantly pepper everybody with proposals and memorandums that are just brief enough to get attention, to intrigue and sustain interest — but too short to include any responsible suggestions for implementation. The scarce people are the ones who have the know-how, energy, daring, and staying power to implement ideas…. Since business is a “get-things-done” institution, creativity without action-oriented follow-through is a barren form of behavior. In a sense, it is irresponsible.

There are only two reasons why anyone ever buys anything: They either want something that they don’t have, or they have something that they don’t want. Either way, it is only in rare cases that what we buy is actually the thing that we want; more often, we’re buying whatever we perceive to be the means that will accomplish our ends—like Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt’s famous line that “people don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want to buy a quarter-inch hole!

One of the surest signs of a bad or declining relationship with a customer is the absence of complaints. Nobody is ever that satisfied, especially not over an extended period of time. The customer is either not being candid or not being contacted. —Theodore Levitt Business School Professor, Harvard University

Harvard economist Theodore Levitt was the first authority to write about what he called the total product.2 A total product has four dimensions that marketers, executives, and support people need to understand if they want customers to appreciate the value of what they are selling:   1.Generic What your product is — software, a suitcase, etc. 2.Expected The essential features and benefits the product must provide, e.g., a refrigerator has to cool food. 3.Value-Added Features and benefits that exceed customer expectations. 4.Potential Future enhancements to value based on what customers want. Levitt’s thinking was daring but limited because it focused on features and benefits but not the overall customer experience. Then in 1999, Geoffrey A. Moore took Levitt’s ideas to the next logical level with his book, Crossing the Chasm. According to Moore, the way to create a “whole” product is to think through both your customer’s problems and solutions. It’s not enough to address the core product — you have to think about everything needed to get your customer from consideration to an imperative to buy. This can be everything from the installation of the product to training to procedural standards to integrations, whether they are provided by your company or achieved using partners.3 “The product is the complete experience and the relationship you and the customer share.” Moore moved beyond features and benefits — bigger iPhones with higher camera resolution — to something else: Being the solution to customers’ problems. Doing that requires more than visionary engineers and brilliant designers. It means getting to know your customers, learning what they care about, and learning to care about them. That’s why Moore is the grandfather of the CPE.

Theodore Levitt, meşhur makalesinde (Marketing Myopia), “İnsanların ihtiyacı, duvarda bir delik açmaktır; matkap değil.” demişti.

Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole.” The lesson is that the drill bit is merely a feature, a means to an end, but what people truly want is the hole it makes.

Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt famously said, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit. They want a quarter-inch hole.

Anything in excess is a poison.” —Theodore Levitt