Editing Strategic management (section)

===Change in focus from production to marketing===
The direction of strategic research also paralleled a major paradigm shift in how companies competed, specifically a shift from the production focus to market focus.  The prevailing concept in strategy up to the 1950s was to create a [[product (business)|product]] of high technical quality. If you created a product that worked well and was durable, it was assumed you would have no difficulty profiting. This was called the [[production orientation]]. [[Henry Ford]] famously said of the Model T car: "Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants, so long as it is black."<ref>[[q:Henry Ford|Wikiquote-Henry Ford]]</ref>

Management theorist [[Peter F Drucker]] wrote in 1954 that it was the customer who defined what business the organization was in.<ref name="Drucker1954"/> In 1960 [[Theodore Levitt]] argued that instead of producing products then trying to sell them to the customer, businesses should start with the customer, find out what they wanted, and then produce it for them. The fallacy of the production orientation was also referred to as [[marketing myopia]] in an article of the same name by Levitt.<ref>[http://hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia/ar/1 Theodore Levitt-Marketing Myopia-HBR-1960]</ref>

Over time, the customer became the driving force behind all strategic business decisions. This [[marketing]] concept, in the decades since its introduction, has been reformulated and repackaged under names including market orientation, customer orientation, customer intimacy, customer focus, customer-driven and market focus.