The Explainer: Don't Just Sell Stuff — Satisfy Needs

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Every year, some 30,000 new consumer products are launched, and 90% of them fail.

A key reason is what the late Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt famously termed marketing myopia-- a nearsighted focus on selling products and services rather than seeing the big picture of what consumers really want.

As he used to tell his students, people don't want to buy a quarter inch drill.

They want to buy a quarter inch hole.

The railroad lines are a classic case study.

They fell into a steep decline because they thought they were in the rail business, rather than being providers of transportation.

Instead of branching out into cars, trucks, or airplanes, they let other companies steal away their passenger and freight traffic.

Or take oil and gas companies.

They belatedly started to think of themselves as energy providers.

But they still devote most of their resources to petroleum.

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