Marketing Imagination New, Expanded Edition [Paperback]

Since its publication in 1983,The Marketing Imaginationhas been widely praised as the classic, all-inclusive Levitt on Marketing. Now Theodore Levitt -- renowned as the Harvard Business School's guru of marketing -- has newly expanded his original work to recap the developing globalization debate and to respond to his critics. He has also added his famed McKinsey Award-winning essay Marketing Myopia, and included detailed accounts of how to maximize the product life cycle and achieve the delicate balance between innovation and imitation. As before, this new edition ofThe Marketing Imaginationshows Levitt at his best -- sharp, knowledgeable, erudite, and, yes, as imaginative as ever.Theodore Levittis Editor of theHarvard Business Reviewand Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. One of the most widely read and respected figures in marketing, he is a four-time winner of the annual McKinsey Award for the best article in theHarvard Business Review.Chapter 1

Marketing and the Corporate Purpose

Nothing in business is so remarkable as the conflicting variety of success formulas offered by its numerous practitioners and professors. And if, in the case of practitioners, they're not exactly formulas, they are explanations of how we did it, implying with firm control over any fleeting tendencies toward modesty that that's howyouought to do it. Practitioners, filled with pride and money, turn themselves into prescriptive philosophers, filled mostly with hot air.

Professors, on the other hand, know better than to deal merely in explanations. We traffic instead in higher goods, like analysis, concepts, and theories. In short, truth. Filled with self-importance, we turn ourselves hopefully into wanted advisers, consultants filled mostly with woolly congestion.

I do not wish to disparage either, but only to suggest that these two legitimlc-