Last year saw the death of Theodore Levitt, the US management guru and long-time faculty member of the Harvard Business School. One of his best known articles – ‘Marketing Myopia’, published in July 1960 in the Harvard Business Review – first raised the proposal that the reason why many businesses failed was because they defined themselves in terms of what they produced, whereas they should have focused on the needs of their customers.

One of the examples he used was the railroad business. ‘The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined,’ he wrote. ‘That grew. The railroads are in trouble today not because that need was filled by others (cars, trucks, airplanes and even the telephone) but because it was not filled by the railroads themselves. 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 incorrectly was that they were railroad-oriented instead of transportation-oriented; they were product-oriented instead of customer-oriented…’

His view was that the reason why growth was threatened, slowed or stopped in a particular business was not because the market was saturated but because there had been a failure of management. This he called ‘marketing myopia’ – in other words, the failure by management to ask the fundamental question: what business are we really in? Is this still relevant today? Just look around.

If you are involved in law firm IT, how many times have you been approached by a legal systems vendor with an upgraded product offering, that may be based on a newer technology platform but otherwise appears to offer no obvious user benefits over and above the version of the system you are already using? That is one of the reasons why many firms are still happily plodding along with older versions of Microsoft Office and Microsoft Windows. And it is also the main reason why many vendors, that have launched .NET versions of their practice management systems, have been less than successful in getting existing users to migrate over to them.

This is marketing myopia. The suppliers believe they are in the technology business, but actually they are in the business solutions market – and that’s all their customers are looking for. And before any law firm managers start feeling too smug, some of them might like to consider their own activities.

Why do they have such large in-house IT departments? Do they think they are also in the IT business? Or is their real business dealing with their clients’ legal matters, in which case they should be outsourcing IT operations to third-party service providers – as Eversheds, Clifford Chance and Linklaters among others are starting to appreciate.

Charles Christian