HBR's 10 Must Reads on Strategic Marketing (with featured article "Marketing Myopia," by Theodore Levitt)

Marketing Malpractice

The Cause and the Cure. by Clayton M. Christensen, Scott Cook, and Taddy Hall

THIRTY THOUSAND NEW CONSUMER products are launched each year. But over 90% of them fail—and that’s after marketing professionals have spent massive amounts of money trying to understand what their customers want. What’s wrong with this picture? Is it that market researchers aren’t smart enough? That advertising agencies aren’t creative enough? That consumers have become too difficult to understand? We don’t think so. We believe, instead, that some of the fundamental paradigms of marketing—the methods that most of us learned to segment markets, build brands, and understand customers—are broken. We’re not alone in that judgment. Even Procter & Gamble ...