By Louis Lavelle

Theodore Levitt, an influential scholar and former editor of Harvard Business Review whose writings radically altered the way marketing is practiced and studied, died Wednesday at his home in Belmont (Mass.) after a long illness. He was 81.

An iconic figure in the world of marketing, Levitt joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1959 and established his reputation a year later with the publication of "Marketing Myopia," an HBR article that went on to sell 850,000 reprints—making it one of the business publication's best-selling articles of all time. In it, he argued that companies that define their mission too narrowly do so at their peril and will soon find themselves overtaken by competitors.

In all, Levitt went on to write 25 articles for the magazine, making him and the late management guru Peter Drucker its most prolific and influential authors. In 1983, he pointed the way to the future—and coined the term "globalization"—with "The Globalization of Markets," an article that examined the new international markets for standardized consumer products and set the stage for the globalization debates of today.

PUBLISHING VETERAN.  Born in 1925 in Vollmerz, Germany, a small town near Frankfurt, Levitt, his parents, and three siblings fled the Nazi regime a decade later for Dayton, Ohio, where he did his first stint as an editor—in the fifth grade. With a young Erma Bombeck, he started a newspaper in his elementary school. In high school, he worked as a reporter for the Dayton Journal Herald and helped Bombeck land a job there. Levitt was drafted into the U.S. Army while still in high school, serving in Europe during World War II. After the war, he earned a doctorate in economics from Ohio State University.

Bombeck went on to become a nationally syndicated columnist, and Levitt went on to author eight books on marketing, from Innovation in Marketing (1962) to The Marketing Imagination (1983). In his books and articles, Levitt elevated marketing from a secondary pursuit in a corporate world consumed with creating and selling products to the primary preoccupation of management. A careful writer, he once claimed he never published anything without at least five serious rewrites.

In 1985, Harvard Business School Dean John McArthur appointed him editor of the Harvard Business Review, a position he held until 1989. During his four years at the helm, he published shorter articles on more subjects and introduced a cleaner design, changes that transformed the publication from an academic journal to a mass-market management magazine. For Levitt, attracting a broader readership that included top executives in a position to put ideas into practice was critical. "If people don't read what you write," he once said, "then what you write is a museum piece."

HARVARD MAN.  At Harvard, Levitt had a reputation as a popular, yet demanding, teacher. His thick mustache and bushy black eyebrows made him instantly recognizable on campus, and his classes were made up of equal parts pedagogy and theater. Striding up and down the aisles, he would sometimes toss chalk at blackboards, not to mention the occasional student. Even many years later, his teaching style was hard to forget. "Ted Levitt taught the first class I took as a student at Harvard Business School," said HBS Dean Jay Light in a written statement. "He had an enormous influence and presence on this campus and was an immense figure in the field of marketing. Ted's work set the highest standards for all of us who worked with him and learned from him. He is a giant in the history of Harvard Business School."

Over the course of his career, which included brief stint as a consultant to the oil industry, Levitt racked up a number of prestigious awards, including four McKinsey awards for his HBR articles and the Academy of Management Award for outstanding business books of 1962 for Innovation in Marketing. He also won the John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business Journalism in 1969.

Levitt retired from the Harvard faculty in 1990, after more than three decades, but continued to spend time on campus, socializing with colleagues, up until a few weeks before his death. The last time he appeared in public at Harvard was in 2003, at a colloquium on globalization. Unable to attend due to poor health, he engaged in a videotaped discussion with long-time friend and Harvard marketing professor Stephen A. Greyser.

For Levitt, Greyser says, the academic life was never about the research, though. Levitt, he says, was at play in the world of ideas. And nothing made him happier than when top executives—"important people in important companies," in his phrase—took those ideas and ran with them. "He became a giant because he had that kind of influence," Greyser says. "If you had an all-star team of management thinkers … Ted Levitt would be the [marketing] guy from Harvard Business School."