TED LEVITT was an influential authority on management and marketing who influenced generations of scholars and practitioners with his ground-breaking and often controversial teaching. His international reputation rested on an enviable and extraordinary ability to generate powerful ideas and then to apply them to practical problems.

Theodore Levitt was born in 1925 in Vollmerz, near Frankfurt, Germany, and with his family escaped from the Nazis in 1935. The family settled in Dayton, Ohio, where they lived in constrained conditions in what he described as a “rough and colourful district”.

His early education was limited by the poor circumstances of the family. Before he finished high school he joined the American Armed Forces and served in Europe in the Second World War. After demobilisation, like many others, he completed his education, obtaining his high-school diploma by a correspondence course. He followed this with a degree at Antioch College. He then earned a doctorate in economics at Ohio State University and he taught at the University of North Dakota.

In 1956 his article in the Harvard Business Review — “The Changing Character of Capitalism” — caught the attention of the Standard Oil Company and led to the next phase of his career when he became a Chicago-based consultant to the oil industry and, later, to a number of international organisations. His services and skills were much sought after.

Levitt joined the faculty of the Harvard Business School in 1959 and quickly established an international reputation as a scholar.

His Marketing Myopia (1960) changed marketing thinking worldwide. He called on companies to ask themselves “What business are we in?”. Such a question might seem almost naive today, but in 1959 his carefully argued thesis, strongly supported by factual evidence, that businesses were defining their purposes too narrowly made management seriously redefine and re-orientate their activities.

The fact that more than 35,000 reprints were requested from the Harvard Business Review is an indication of the impact the article made.

Twenty-five years later Levitt initiated a still-raging controversy in the worldwide business community with his l983 article The Globalization of Marketing — which introduced the word “globalisation” into the international vocabulary. He asserted that companies had largely ignored the impact of new technologies, which had “proletarianised” communications, transportation and travel, generating a new commercial reality.

He pointed to the emergence of globalised markets for standardised consumer products at lower prices achieved by economies of scale, and evidence that his analysis was correct could be inferred from the changing policies of such companies as Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s, McDonald’s and others.

Although many of these companies became hate figures for pressure groups and politicians, Levitt later observed that this reaction against some American products and firms merely validated his thesis of globalised markets. “To some people, it looks like a foreign intrusion on domestic industry and a violation of culture, habits and ways of doing business. The octave level of the reaction shows very clearly that there is a lot at stake.”

Levitt wrote or co-wrote seven successful books and published 25 articles in the Harvard Business Review). He and the late Peter Drucker were the most published authors in the Review.

He became Editor of the HBR in 1985, and, according to its current Editor, was the most successful incumbent of the position the publication has ever had. He brought the magazine to a new standard of readability while not compromising its intellectual quality. He transformed it from an academic journal into a more accessible publication, focusing on important ideas and practices that influenced a readership which included top business leaders. He managed all the while to retain his academic readers and raised the status of the Review.

Levitt was appointed Edward W. Carter Professor of Business Administration in 1979. He developed a theatrical teaching style in class, striding up and down the aisles, tossing chalk at blackboards and students, all of which generated an excitement which his students never forgot.

By the time he retired from the active faculty in 1990, Levitt was considered one of the Business School’s legends, a seminal scholar who had radically altered marketing both as a practice within corporations and industries and as field of academic inquiry.

He is survived by his wife of 58 years, Joan, and four children.

Theodore Levitt, academic authority on marketing, was born on March 1, 1925. He died on June 28, 2006, aged 81.