Content area
Full Text
ABSTRACT. Theodore Levitt criticizes John Kenneth Galbraith's view of advertising as artificial want creation, contending that its selling focus on the product fails to appreciate the marketing focus on the consumer. But Levitt himself not only ends up endorsing selling; he fails to confront the fact that the marketing to our most pervasive needs that he advocates really represents a sophisticated form of selling. He avoids facing this by the fiction that marketing is concerned only with the material level of existence, and absolves marketing of serious involvement in the level of meaning through the relativization of all meanings as personal preferences. The irony is that this itself reflects a particular view of meaning, a modern commercial one, so that it is this vision of life that Levitt's marketing is really SELLING.
Theodore Levitt's Marketing Myopia1
Business academic Theodore Levitt enjoys wide influence as an exponent of the importance of marketing for contemporary business. Among the implications of this focus, none is more central than the insistence on identifying and catering to the needs of the consumer. The impression conveyed by this insistence is an expectation of a basically humanitarian, if not actually altruistic, demeanor on the part of the enlightened business corporation. If such an expectation sounds fanciful, this may be more indicative of enthusiasm in Levitt's promotion of marketing, than of a misreading of his intent. While he does acknowledge that the marketing orientation has to be balanced by other more traditional selfinterests of the corporation,2 when he lauds the virtues of marketing itself, this note of realism is difficult to detect. The irony is that Levitt's enthusiasm for the marketing mode discloses precisely the tactics and influences that are of concern to critics of marketing, and especially of the advertising portion of its activity.3
1. Levitt's Quarrel with Galbraith
What Levitt means by marketing emerges clearly in his criticism of economist John Kenneth Galbraith's view of advertising. A central thesis of Galbraith's The Affluent Society is that the main function of advertising is to create markets for the products that technology is making available. "The affluent society increases its wants and therewith its consumption pari passu with its production."4 As the productive ability of society has increased through modern technology, advertising...