Theodore Levitt, who died yesterday at the age of 81, was a colourful Harvard Business School professor and a prominent figure in the field of marketing, perhaps most famous for coining the term "globalisation".
Mr Levitt, known as Ted, was also a former editor of the Harvard Business Review, where he became known for his carefully crafted writing. In 1960 he authored one of the most popular Review articles of all time, "Marketing Myopia", which argued that companies and industries declined because managers defined their businesses too narrowly.
The railways, for instance, "let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business instead of the transportation business", he wrote.
In that same article, Mr Levitt - who delighted in provocative language - made his famous statement that "marketing is a stepchild" in most corporations because of an over-emphasis on creating and selling products.
Mr Levitt was the first to use the word "globalisation" in a 1983 Review article arguing that new technologies had "proletarianised" communication, transportation and travel, creating worldwide markets for standardised consumer products at lower prices.
He maintained that the future belonged not to the multinational corporation but to the "global corporation" that did not cater to local differences in taste.
Theodore Levitt was born in 1925 in Germany, but at age 10 moved with his family to Dayton, Ohio, to escape the encroaching Nazi threat. Drafted into the US Army before he finished high school, Mr Levitt served in Europe during the second world war.
At the end of the war he returned to his home town and took a job as a sports writer at the local newspaper. He earned his high school diploma through a correspondence course and graduated from Antioch College in 1949. Two years later he earned a doctorate in economics from Ohio State University and began teaching at the University of North Dakota.
Mr Levitt wrote his first article for the Harvard Business Review in 1956, entitled "The Changing Character of Capitalism". The article caught the attention of executives at the Standard Oil Company and led to a job as a Chicago-based consultant to the oil industry.
Several years later he was recruited to join the HBS faculty.
Mr Levitt - who was the author or co-author of eight books including The Marketing Imagination - once told an interviewer that henever published anything without at least five serious rewrites.
"It's not to change the substance so much; it's to change the pace, the sound, the sense of making progress - even the physical appearance of it. Why should you make customers go through the torture chamber? I want them to say, 'Aha!'
