Universities: what business are we in?

The railroads collapsed because they thought they were in the railroad business, when really they were in the transportation business.

They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business. The reason they defined their industry wrong was because they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented; they were product-oriented instead of customer-oriented.

Theodore Levitt, "Marketing Myopia", Harvard Business Review 38 (July-August 1960), 45-57, at 45.

(Thanks to Jim O'Donnell for locating the source of this wisdom.)


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Last modified: Thursday, 19-Sep-1996 00:34:20 EDT