Marketing Myopia is 65 years old. It's still the best business book ever written.

Theodore Levitt published "Marketing Myopia" in the *Harvard Business Review* in 1960. It's a 12-page article that's more useful than most business books published since.

The thesis: companies fail when they define their business by the product, not by the purpose.

The examples that built the argument

• Railroads. Defined themselves as "in the railroad business." They were in transportation. They lost to trucks, planes, and cars.
• Hollywood. Defined itself as "in the movie business." It was in stories. TV won the storytelling wars.
• Oil companies. Defined themselves as "in the oil business." They're in energy. They're now losing to solar and nuclear.

How to apply it today

Ask yourself: if my product disappeared tomorrow, what would my customer lose?

• If they lose *your product*, you have a product business. Fragile.
• If they lose *the outcome your product enables*, you have a purpose business. Durable.

The Hub is not a "marketing automation tool." It's a revenue engine for sovereign operators. If we disappear, operators don't lose "a tool" — they lose the ability to run their entire business from one place. That's harder to replicate.

The Levitt questions

Use these quarterly:

1. What business are we really in? 2. Who are our customers, really? (Not "ICP" — actual humans.) 3. What would our customers miss if we disappeared? 4. What industry are we adjacent to that could subsume us? 5. What would we have to become to win in 10 years?

If the answers scare you, you're thinking clearly.

The BAZ Empire take

The Hub's Strategy section makes you answer those questions. The Patrick Number scores how well your answers match your actions. The Library has Levitt's framework in actionable form.

Build the purpose, not the product: [/leads](/leads).