My Insight of "Marketing Myopia"
From：Wang zhiping
ID：21-3999-79
By reading the text, I learned that:
1. to recognize the development of an industry, not only limited to the development of a class of products, to
meet the changes and innovation of the whole industry.
2. The concept of "irreplaceable" is the risk of enterprise development. When confronted with the
dimensionality reduction blow of the industrial revolution, the cost is painful.
3. Public utilities, natural monopoly will also die of natural causes. In China, the government TV station was
defeated by network broadcast and network video, and the government taxi was defeated by social network
ride-hailing.
4. The benefits of population base should not be blindly believed. Fine marketing is the right choice.
5. Although large-scale production can reduce costs and increase profits, it is not flexible enough to respond
to demand. Once the market changes, the loss of input will be huge.
6, excessive technological innovation and research and development, if deviated from the market, is a failure
of the market work.
Marketing myopia refers to the managers of enterprises and institutions, blindly optimistic and confident
about the products and technologies produced by enterprises; Equating the industry with a specific product, the
industry is oblivious to the threat of substitutes and potential competitors in its development; Ignoring customer
needs and their changes, blindly obsessed with the improvement of existing products, ignoring product
innovation and enterprise reform. This is marketing myopia.
There is no such thing as a growth industry, I believe. There are only companies organized and operated to
create and capitalize on growth opportunities. Industries that assume themselves to be riding some automatic
growth escalator invariably descend into stagnation. The history of every dead and dying "growth" industry
shows a self-deceiving cycle of bountiful expansion and undetected decay.
There are four conditions that usually guarantee this cycle:
1.The belief that growth is assured by an expanding and more affluent population;
2. The belief that there is no competitive substitute for the industry's major product;
3. Too much faith in mass production and in the advantages of rapidly declining unit costs as output rises;
4. Preoccupation with a product that lends itself to carefully controlled scientific experimentation, improvement,
and manufacturing cost reduction.
Coke's competition is not just Pepsi, but all the world's thirst-quenching beverages.
In mainland China,
its biggest competitors are not Pepsi, but Wong Lo Kat and JDB. Sales of the two herbal teas far outnumber
sales of any single Coca-Cola brand in mainland China. With the popularity of herbal tea, even KFC restaurants
began to offer herbal tea drinks (K Kee herbal tea).
Therefore, enterprises should truly understand their competitors in a broad sense and deeply understand the
needs of customers. Otherwise, when enterprises commit marketing myopia, the cost will be very large, and
even many famous enterprises will fall down or go bankrupt.
Kodak, once one of the most famous brands in the history of global commerce, failed because of one fatal
mistake: marketing myopia. Kodak was once one of America's top brands and a symbol of American cultural
expansion. In its glory days, Kodak occupied two-thirds of the world's film market, employed 86,000 people
and operated franchised stores all over the world. In the 1980s and 1990s, Kodak's golden logo was everywhere
on Chinese streets.
So why did Kodak fail? Most people attribute Kodak's failure to the fact that its success in the film era did
not translate into success in the digital camera era, that is, because film was made obsolete by the new digital
camera technology. Actually, that's not fair to Kodak. Kodak was not only the leader in film technology, but it
was also the world leader in digital camera technology.
As early as 1975, Kodak introduced the world's first digital camera technology, but the Kodak president and
other senior management at the time did not realize the importance of digital camera technology. Why is that?
The reason was simply that they had a simple calculation in mind: What would make more money to sell? Is it
a digital camera or film?
The answer is obvious. Customers need to buy film every week. It is a consumable item and needs to be
repeated. What about digital cameras? One purchase might last two or three years. Therefore, Kodak Company
at that time based on such a judgment that selling digital cameras is not as profitable as selling film, so it
strategically did not pay attention to digital camera technology, and put its own initiative of digital camera
technology on the back of a cloud. That's why, years after Kodak invented digital camera technology, it wasn't
until its competitors developed similar digital camera technology on their own that Kodak reacted, but it was
too late to make the transition. Therefore, we are very sorry to see that on January 19, 2012, Kodak, a famous
enterprise with 131 years of history and market value as high as tens of billions of dollars, filed for bankruptcy
protection and went on the road of decline.
It was Kodak's top management's lack of understanding of customer needs that led to Kodak's failure today.
Customers don't buy film for the sake of buying film. So what is the customer need that buying film satisfies? Is
to keep the good memories of the moment. So customers are likely to switch to any new product that serves the
same purpose and that satisfies their needs better than the existing product.
Therefore, enterprises should always remember that customer needs are eternal, and products (desires) can
always be upgraded. Any new product that can better meet the needs of customers has a future. And old
products, no matter how successful and brilliant they were, are likely to be replaced by new ones.
It wasn't just Kodak that was guilty of fatal marketing myopia. MOTOROLA was, too. As the king of the
pager era, MOTOROLA once occupied more than 80% of the global market share, is the world's king of
communications. By the time of the mobile phone, however, MOTOROLA was overtaken by Nokia (which, of
course, was later overtaken by the likes of Apple, Samsung and even our own Chinese Huawei in the
smartphone era).
A lot of people may overlook a key fact, who invented the mobile phone? If you know anything about it,
you'll know that Nokia didn't invent the mobile phone, MOTOROLA did. In 1973, MOTOROLA invented the
world's first mobile phone DynaTAC, the inventor is the famous father of mobile phone Martin Cooper
(Cooper). In 1983, after a decade of work, the FCC approved the world's first phone, the DynaTAC 8000X, a
$3,995, 2-pound model that was the first mobile phone.
So there is a great irony in the failure of both Kodak and MOTOROLA -- that the new technology that led to
their failure was invented by both companies themselves. However, due to the success of the undue absorption
in the past, ignore the real needs of the customers, ignore the "customer buy enterprise products to meet the
purpose of what is" such a fundamental problem, led to kodak and MOTOROLA has always been reluctant to
invest more resources on the company's new products, which eventually led to when competitors with the same
new products, The two companies' once successful old products were upgraded and never recovered.
For all, The Beginning and End.The view that an industry is a customer-satisfying process, not a
goods-producing process, is vital for all business people to understand. An industry begins with the customer
and his or her needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill. Given the customer's needs, the
industry develops backwards, first concerning itself with the physical delivery of customer satisfactions.Then it
moves back further to creating the things by which these satisfactions are in part achieved. How these materials
are created is a matter of indifference to the customer, hence the particular form of manufacturing, processing,
or what have you cannot be considered as a vital aspect of the industry. Finally, the industry moves back still
further to finding the raw materials necessary for making its products.