Hoarding money, marketing myopia, and failure

The term “marking myopia” is fairly new to me, though the concept is something I’ve seen many times before.

Explained by Theodore Levitt, it’s essentially when a company focuses more on short-term sales than on really solving their consumers’ needs. It can work for a while, but it’s likely to blow up eventually. The two famous examples:

Kodak

They pretended they were in the photography business, but really they were in the business of developing photos — and making huge money from the chemicals needed in that process.

They were the first to develop a digital camera, but always tried to force it back to people getting prints. A great example of this was when Kodak purchased Ofoto (a photo sharing site) in 2001. It could have been huge, but Kodak essentially just used it to try to get people to print more copies of their digital photos.

You see where Kodak is today.

Yahoo

Yahoo was similar. The banners on the Yahoo home page sold for extraordinary sums of money and made tons of profit for them. They really didn’t want companies to measure the effectiveness of those ads — they wanted customers to just feel proud to be on their home page and pay whatever it took to get there.