Theodore Levitt Quotes

Business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.

An industry begins with the customer and his or her needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill

Proper business planning demands that you focus on the self-interest of the customer at all times.

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.

Best way to succeed is to do things for the customer, not to the competition. Very few people buy a product in order to help you hurt the competition. To think otherwise is lunacy.

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

The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

Businesses are not paid to reform customers. They are paid to satisfy customers.

True marketing starts...with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"

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.

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.

We're not competitor obsessed, we're customer obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards.

Is there any other industry [than the press] in this country which seeks to presume so completely to give the customer what he does not want?

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.

It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want.

While profit remains the final goal, entrepreneurs spend the better part of each day figuring out how better to serve the needs of their actual and potential customers. They are operationally, if not intentionally, altruistic.

Make every decision—even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone—according to what's best for your customers.

The idea that comics stores, distributors and publishers simply 'give the customers what they want' is nonsense. What the customers wanted they didn't get - and they left.

Forget about yourncompetitors, just focus on your customers.

The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going.

If people keep buying poorly designed products, manufacturers and designers will think they are doing the right thing and continue as usual.

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want.

To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every business.

When I say 'serve you better,' I mean 'increase our profits.' We newspapers are very big on profits these days.

It is well worth remembering that the customer is the most important factor in any business. If you don't think so, try getting along without him for a while.