In perspective
A major influence on Levitt's work was the writing of Peter Drucker, who was among the first to see marketing as all pervasive:
'Marketing is not a function, it is the whole business seen from the customer's point of view.' (The practice of management)
However, although influenced by academic thought, Levitt drew his greatest inspiration from the real world, examining the companies around him and distilling the examples of good and bad practice which illustrate much of his writing.
Levitt's influence contributed to the rise of the marketing concept in the 1960s and its increasing incorporation into management thinking, initially in the United States of America but later also in Europe. His subsequent works may not have achieved the fame of Marketing myopia, but they are nevertheless an important part of the evolving pattern of marketing writing which has gathered impetus through recent decades. By pointing out the myopic vision of many managers, Levitt set in motion a vigorous new way of thinking which was taken up by other management writers and practitioners and culminated in the rebirth of marketing in the 1980s. Other marketing gurus such as Philip Kotler acknowledge the influence of Levitt's work, and he is regularly quoted.
In retrospect, Levitt was proven to have had remarkable foresight in his anticipation of the importance of marketing to organisations, his initial work predating the marketing boom by two decades. He also successfully predicted the value of relationship marketing, a topic which only became an identifiable discipline in the early 1990s, and the concept of the global village, which is now commonplace.
Levitt's assertion that there is no such thing as a growth industry is another tenet which has proved influential, and writers such as Tom Peters and Richard Pascale have taken up this idea in the 1990s.