The Explainer: Don't Just Sell Stuff — Resolve Needs

Harvard Business Review · Oct 18, 2026 · 3m

The Explainer: Don’t Just Sell Stuff — Satisfy Needs

24 Jul 2019

---

Theodore Levitt's classic theory says that an industry is a customer-satisfying process, not a goods-producing process. An industry begins with the customer and his or her needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill. Given the customer’s needs, the industry develops backwards, first concerning itself with the physical delivery of customer satisfactions. Then it moves back further to creating the things by which these satisfactions are in part achieved. How these materials are created is a matter of…