Charles Saatchi Quotes

[Discussing economic trends:] You can find a study that says anything.

Facts are stubborn, but statistics are more pliable.

While data can only tell you what has happened in the past, it can in some ways give you a sense of what might be of interest to an audience in the future.

There is a reasonable concern that posting raw data can be misleading for those who are not trained in its use and who do not have the broader perspective within which to place a particular piece of data that is raw.

One of the most untruthful things possible, you know, is a collection of facts, because they can be made to appear so many different ways.

People say that it’s easy to lie with statistics. Well it’s a lot easier to lie without them.

The Government are very keen on amassing statistics; they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.

Don’t push out figures when facts are going in the opposite direction.

Visiting stores and testing products is one of the critical elements of the analyst's job.

We don't believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public. So we never do any.

To create something you want to sell, you first study and research the market, then you develop the product to the best of your ability.

That's what we do when we work in Silicon Valley tech startups: We think about who's going to benefit from this. That's almost the only thing we think about.

The e-mails are mainly about a controversy over a particular data set and the ways a particular small group of scientists have displayed that dataset.

Think about the market, think about the design, and think about who is going to design for that market. Hit the mark.

The World Bank is the monopoly provider of poverty data and, partly due to a leadership change there, the World Bank's reporting has been heavily on the rosy side since about 2000. The Bank's cultivation of an upbeat picture affords a very interesting lesson in statistics and how you can, depending on which numbers you present and how you present them, create a more positive or more negative impression of the evolution of poverty.

The game of investing is one of making better predictions about the future than other people. How are you going to do that? One way is to limit your tries to areas of competence. If you try to predict the future of everything, you attempt too much.

Greatest risk is not development of new product, but development of customers and markets

While statistics are interesting, they're all in the past.

I study my competition for at least an hour a day. I get on the internet, look at what they doing, then I look at ways to defeat them.

Running a company on market research is like driving while looking in the rear view mirror.

Without the knowledge of the true number of the people, as a principle, the whole scope and use of keeping bills of birth and burials is impaired; wherefore by laborious conjectures and calculations to deduce the number of people from the births and burials, may be ingenious, but very preposterous.

Research is an organized method of trying to find out what you are going to do after you cannot do what you are doing now. It may also be said to be the method of keeping a customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has. That means constant improvement and change so that the customer will be stimulated to desire the new product enough to buy it to replace the one he has.

Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is easier. Don't create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market - define your customers - then find or develop a product for them.

Still, it is an error to argue in front of your data. You find yourself insensibly twisting them round to fit your theories.

Market-driven design builds the success of the product's marketing into the product itself.