Mary Quant Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

Television networks are a lot like automobile manufacturers or anyone else who's in commerce. If something out there catches on with the public... I guess you can call it 'market research.'

Advertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than to initiate them.

As a consumer goods company serving billions of consumers every day, Unilever understands the drivers and motivations that create the norms that lie behind people's behaviour.

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

It had always made sense to me to build a business based on what people really wanted, rather than guess what we thought they might want.

Beverages have to be created. And they're created by looking at what trend is in, say, the fashion industry - what color's hot right now.

Consumer habits are key to understanding how to launch a product.

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

I haven't figured out why people like what they like. I don't know. I wish I did. I could sell that to everybody, man, and be a millionaire.

There just doesn't seem to be a market for something with aspiration anymore.

There are two kinds of designers: ones who are very happy locked in their office surrounded by their coterie. The last thing they need to do is to go to a trunk show; they'd go running for the hills. I not only enjoy it, I think, how do you design things that are applicable to life - unless you live it?

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.

I always wanted to work on the consumer market; I always wanted to work with people.

People want what they want, for as long as they want it, then tastes change and something else works.

I'm not opposed to doing a fashion line, but I want to make sure it's the right thing and make sure its something people actually want instead of putting out a bunch of stuff that's already been done.

When you take the individual out of the equation, then you're making programming based on some marketer's idea of what will sell, and not based on the idea of what an individual would like.

We spent a lot of time trend forecasting and collaborating on ways to design a fresh line of fashion-forward, affordable luxury.

The biggest thing is to create a product that consumers find useful. As more and more people like something, it becomes harder and harder to have a conspiracy theory about it.