Home topics small-business-resources sales-and-marketing Marketing Marketing What business are you really in? Joel Norton August 12, 2010 It’s not a new question but it’s an important one to ask. Theodore Levitt wrote an article for Harvard Business Review in 1960 entitled “Marketing Myopia”, where he encouraged businesses to switch their focus from selling to meeting customer needs. He asked an important question to the railroad industry: What business are you really in? Railroads or transportation? The question requires you to think about your bigger purpose, that of serving the needs of your customers. For a publisher that means forgetting about the media of newspaper or magazines, and thinking about how do my customers want to consume my content, which has quickly migrated online and now to mobile handheld devices. What does that mean for small business? Are you a coffee shop or time-out business? Are you an accountant or in the business of building personal wealth? Are you a builder or do you make people’s dreams a reality? I’d like to take it a step further. The ‘service’ you offer, whether it’s cutting someone’s hair, doing their tax or making widgets are really the operations of your business. The reality is, no matter what ‘business’ you’re in, you’re actually in the marketing business. John Jantsch, founder of Duct Tape Marketing, defines marketing as “Getting a person with a specific need or problem to know, like and trust you”. When you look at your business in this way, it can change