Steve Jobs Quotes

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

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.

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.

The simplest way to assure sales is to keep changing the product the market for new things is indefinitely elastic. One of the fundamental purposes of advertising, styling, and research is to foster a healthy dissatisfaction.

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

It's all about producing products people want.

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.

Market leaders inevitably slip into decline when they tell the people what they want instead of giving the people what they want.

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.

It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.

It's not about pop culture, and it's not about fooling people, and it's not about convincing people that they want something they don't. We figure out what we want. And I think we're pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That's what we get paid to do.

Salads was a big indicator of that - there was a huge market out there for it. And why not tap it? Some of the things we are doing now around the globe are responding to customers. It's not because some guy sued you.

We need to listen to consumers' needs.

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

There are two ways to extend a business. Take inventory of what you're good at and extend out from your skills. Or determine what your customers need and work backward, even if it requires learning new skills. Kindle is an example of working backward.

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.

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

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

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.

What the customer demands is last year's model, cheaper. To find out what the customer needs you have to understand what the customer is doing as well as he understands it. Then you build what he needs and you educate him to the fact that he needs it.

Don’t ask our customers what they want. Ask yourself what they would want if they knew what you know of what is possible for us to do for them. The burden is on us to understand the consumer’s needs sufficiently to answer that question.

Too many bar owners built a bar for themselves... when they should have built what their market and demographic demands!

Products are sold because they solve a problem or fill a need. Understanding problems and needs involves understanding customers and what makes them tick.

We know what the customer wants, and so we're buying in a totally different way.

To succeed in business you need to be original, but you also need to understand what your customers want.