...business articles commonly use the expression "marketing myopia," to describe the condition by which corporations are unable to look beyond their product and toward their long-term and comprehensive marketing opportunities. Over the past forty years, this article has served to influence and chastise many companies into developing more comprehensive and certainly more long-range marketing plans. Levitt also encourages companies to define their industry segments in broader terms and accuses a great number of companies of also suffering from "planning myopia," a failure to anticipate social and economic changes such as peaking population growth, foreign competition, and the rise of the service economy. Levitt asserted that the traditional foundation of sales departments for a majority or organizations had become "meeting the quota" or "moving product." Levitt argues that such an approach is doomed to fail in the long run. He predicted that consumers would increasingly turn to the companies and the salespeople who understood their needs - and who met those needs with items and services that...