Jewelry Industry Suffers from Myopia
Theodore Levitt, a noted professor of marketing at Harvard Business School, wrote a classic entitled Marketing Myopia. In it, he described the fundamental question every industry faces and too many times ignores: correctly defining the business from the consumer’s perspective – not the producer’s, not the manufacturer’s.
Levitt gave a prime example of an industry that failed to think this way – the railroad business. It was an industry with acute tunnel vision (excuse the pun). It saw only tracks, rails, locomotives, and stations. It failed to view itself as a part of the wider transportation segment. As a consequence, railroads had no technological strategies to deal with the coming of automobiles, trucks, and airplanes.
What has this to do with the jewelry business? The connection occurred to me as I listened to the speeches at the o