Prof Theodore Levitt’s passing was reported by Grant McCracken at This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics last week and is certainly worth more than a nod to Grant’s blog or the Harvard Business School site.
   Levitt’s name takes me back to my early marketing days at B-school, where I read ‘The Globalization of Markets’, in which the term globalization was apparently coined. He made a convincing argument about the homogenization of markets, one which underpins many business decisions today. For better or for worse, Levitt made us sit up and take notice of the phenomenon. His work on differentiation in The Marketing Imagination underpinned some of my own beliefs about branding and marketing, though I admit I never read the original work, just excerpts cited in other academic articles on the topic. And his allegation in his early ‘Marketing Myopia’, that there are companies that focus on sales before marketing, but pretend they are the same, still rings true.
   Without Levitt, the blogosphere would be far poorer, too, as we take his thinking into the 21st century.
   Levitt was 81, and is survived by his wife, Joan, four children, six grandchildren and two sisters. Posted by Jack Yan, 11:07  permalink

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