Marketing Myopia: 5 Positive Insights for Success

In the span of a few days this month, two of America’s biggest retailers quietly rewrote the job description of the chief marketing officer. Target hired Hilton’s Mark Weinstein as Chief Marketing and Guest Experience Officer, reporting directly to CEO Michael Fiddelke, with Roundel (its retail media network) and Target+ (its marketplace) folded into his remit alongside brand. Lowe’s promoted CMO Jen Wilson to executive vice president and handed her digital commerce, on top of marketing, retail media, loyalty and personalization. This shift reflects a broader trend in the industry, where the issue of marketing myopia is becoming increasingly relevant.

This shift reflects a broader trend in the industry, where the issue of marketing myopia is becoming increasingly relevant. As companies face challenges, understanding marketing myopia can guide them toward better solutions.

Thus, addressing marketing myopia is critical for sustainable growth and aligning organizational structure with customer needs.

The trade press read this as a win for marketing: the CMO role is expanding, the function has earned a bigger seat. That read is flattering, and it’s wrong. These aren’t promotions for marketing. They’re confessions about org design. And the CEOs who respond by stapling more boxes under their own CMO will build a bigger version of the exact problem Target and Lowe’s are trying to fix.

Levitt’s insights into marketing myopia are still applicable today, urging businesses to reconsider their focus.

This illustrates how marketing myopia can hinder a company’s ability to adapt to changing consumer behaviors.

Recognizing the signs of marketing myopia can prevent organizations from becoming obsolete.

The experiences detailed illustrate the importance of avoiding marketing myopia in organizational strategy.

Effective reorganization can help combat marketing myopia and refocus efforts on customer needs.

Levitt Diagnosed This Org Chart 66 Years Ago

Marketing myopia often emerges when companies prioritize internal processes over customer experiences.

Only by addressing marketing myopia can companies truly serve their customers effectively.

The evolving landscape demands that businesses recognize and overcome marketing myopia.

Ignoring the dynamics of marketing myopia can result in lost opportunities and ineffective strategies.

Companies must learn from past failures related to marketing myopia to thrive in competitive markets.

Ultimately, addressing marketing myopia is essential for long-term success and customer loyalty.

Making a conscious effort to avoid marketing myopia can lead to more innovative approaches.

The recognition of marketing myopia as a threat shapes how businesses develop their strategies.

In summary, Target and Lowe’s are adjusting their focus to avoid marketing myopia in the future.

By embracing change and addressing marketing myopia, organizations can align themselves better with customer expectations.

Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia is remembered for the railroads — companies that declined because they believed they were in the railroad business instead of the transportation business. The less-quoted half of the argument is the one that matters here. Levitt’s real target was organizational: companies that treat marketing as a department that sells what the rest of the business decided to make, instead of treating the entire company as a system built from the customer backward.

Look at what Target and Lowe’s actually had before this month. Brand in one place. Retail media in another. The marketplace somewhere else. Digital commerce reporting through a different executive with a different scorecard. Each of those units was optimized for its own P&L, which is another way of saying each was designed from the company forward. The customer doesn’t experience “brand,” then “retail media,” then “marketplace,” then “checkout.” She experiences one Target. Lowe’s own numbers make the point: more than 80% of home improvement shopping now starts online, which means the line between “marketing” and “the store” stopped existing years ago. Only the org chart still believed in it.

So the diagnosis isn’t “the CMO deserves more.” It’s that the business had been organized around its own products and revenue lines, and customer-facing work had been split into fiefdoms. Consolidating it under one leader is the correction. The title is incidental.

What I Learned Redrawing the Lines at Pinnacle

I’ve made this call myself, and the hard part wasn’t the reorg. It was deciding what the reorg was for.

When I stepped into the CMO seat at Pinnacle Global Network, the easy move was to ask for more: more headcount, more channels, more budget lines under marketing. Instead, we redrew the function around one question — what does a member actually need from us, from first touch to renewal? — and let that answer decide what marketing owned. Social and content stopped being separate teams with separate reports and became one distribution function with one person accountable for whether members could find us, wherever they looked. Before any budget went to the board, it came with a written targeting rationale that named the segments we were walking away from.

That’s what made a 60% cost reduction defensible rather than a cut. We didn’t get smaller by trimming. We got smaller by refusing to staff work organized around our internal structure instead of the member’s path. Earlier in my career, building a 7,000-person international sales organization, I saw the mirror image: every seam between marketing and sales was a place where the customer got handed off, re-qualified and re-pitched by people with different incentives. Nobody designed those seams on purpose. They were the residue of an org chart drawn from the inside out.

The lesson from both: consolidation only works when the organizing principle is the customer’s job. When the organizing principle is the executive’s span of control, you just get a bigger silo.

The Wrong Lesson Every Board Will Take From This

Here’s what I expect to happen across the Fortune 1000 over the next two quarters. CEOs will read these announcements, and some will expand the CMO role to cover commerce, CX, loyalty and retail media in the name of “owning the customer journey.” Most will do it without changing how the business defines itself. The new super-CMO will inherit four teams, four scorecards and four sets of incentives, and will spend the first year managing operations instead of setting strategy.

That’s not Levitt’s fix. It’s Levitt’s disease with a longer title. Putting commerce under marketing doesn’t make a company market-oriented any more than putting the railroads under a “transportation officer” would have saved them. The question Levitt forces is upstream of the org chart: what business are you actually in, from the customer’s side of the counter? Target’s answer appears to be something like “the most trusted way to discover and buy for your household,” and Roundel and Target+ make sense under one leader only because that answer holds them together. Lowe’s answer is about helping a homeowner finish a project, a journey that runs through a phone long before it reaches an aisle.

If you can’t write your version of that sentence, a bigger CMO remit won’t give you one. It’ll give one executive more ways to fail.

This is also why I’d push back on the reflex to frame this as a CMO-versus-CDO or CMO-versus-COO turf question. That debate is itself myopic, because it’s about who owns the boxes. The strategic question is whether the boxes should exist in their current shape at all.

The Question to Bring to Your Next Board Meeting

Target and Lowe’s didn’t expand the CMO role. They admitted their organizations had been designed around themselves, and they’re rebuilding around the customer. The title change is the least important part of the story.

So before anyone in your company proposes giving marketing a bigger portfolio, answer the question Levitt would ask first: if your customer drew your org chart, would it look anything like the one you have? And if it wouldn’t, why are you about to reorganize around it?