Millard Drexler Quotes

I love market research because you really have an idea of what your consumers are looking for.

Companies are very, very good - better than consumers themselves - at knowing what consumers are actually craving.

How do you know what people value? Well, you watch what they buy. How do we know what products to create? Well, it's based on what they value.

I'm not from a retail background, but I am a shopper.

I think we have a great track record on being relevant, on identifying consumer trends, needs and wants.

When companies try to guess what consumers want, they essentially make the choice for consumers.

We're going to be selling our product to the American consumer. We want to have Americans who understand American consumers.

People are always going to go shopping. A lot of our effort is just: 'How do we make the retail experience a great one?'

The public don't know what they want; it's my job to tell them.

I don't believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.

It's in our best interest to put some of the old rules aside and create new ones and follow the consumer - what the consumer wants and where the consumer wants to go.

The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.

We're not in the business of shaping consumer demand. We respond to it.

We're guided by consumer data, and it helps give us the confidence to invest where the consumer is going.

To study consumer behavior is to explore human nature at its most fundamental level using the modern world as its backdrop.

I was a woman and younger. I started spending a lot of time in the mall doing a lot of qualitative research and really watching what consumers were doing. Were they gravitating towards the sales racks, or were they looking at the new fashions? Were they there to shop, or were they there to socialize?

Certainly in business terms, considering how thriving the market is. Understanding what people want is essential. We have a team on the ground whose job it is to keep tabs on what's good, whether it's a tapas bar in Barcelona, or an amazing fish and chip shop in Yorkshire.

It's not the consumers' job to figure out what they want

No longer do companies study consumers' psyches only by asking people what they think about technology and how they use it. Now they conduct observational research, dispatching anthropologists to employ their ethnographic skills by interviewing, watching and videotaping consumers in their natural habitats.

Customers don't know what they want. There's plenty of good psychology research that shows that people are not able to accurately predict how they would behave in the future. So asking them, 'Would you buy my product if it had these three features?' or 'How would you react if we changed our product this way?' is a waste of time. They don't know.

But in another, I think a woman's going to go into a shop to find a coat or a jacket and I just don't think she's not going to go into a shop because of a bad review she probably didn't even read.

I think we are living in a time where the consumer has lots of choices, whether it's coffee, newspapers or whatever it is. And there is parity in the market place, and as a result of that, the consumer is beginning to make decisions, not just on what things cost and the convenience of it.

In fashion, we don't often know the prices. We don't have time to go into the stores.

When you focus on the consumer, the consumer responds.

We do have our finger on the pulse of the marketplace, if for no other reasons than having all these live events and listening to our audience all the time.