Gillian Tans Quotes

You have to understand who your customer is and her motivations and marry it to what's happening in the outside world.

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.

Forget 'branding' and 'positioning.' Once you understand customer behavior, everything else falls into place.

It's incredibly important to be - once you do have a product - acutely observational about the trends.

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

My dad built his business by providing products he figured the customers would want.

The fact that used cars is our largest category is a good example. We would not have sat in a conference room and said, "Hey, how about used cars?" So what can be learned that is extensible to other companies is to ask what are your customers doing with your products that maybe you didn't anticipate that they would do? How do you think of your customers as your research and development lab, as opposed to having an R&D lab at headquarters?

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

Listen to your customers but don't (always) believe what they say-they know even less about the future than you.

Customers can't always tell you what they want, but they can always tell you what's wrong.

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.

Put your consumers in focus, and listen to what they're actually saying, not what they tell you.

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

Customers have different need states and life experiences.

There is a calculus, it turns out, for mastering our subconscious urges. For companies like Target, the exhaustive rendering of our conscious and unconscious patterns into data sets and algorithms has revolutionized what they know about us and, therefore, how precisely they can sell.

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

When I was in graduate school in consumer science and math, all of the big companies had labs, all doing blue sky research.

Social media has given companies access to unprecedented amounts of information on client behavior and preferences - so-called Big Data. But making sense of it all and turning it into actionable policy has been elusive.

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

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.'

We need to reengineer companies to focus on figuring out who the customer is, what's the market and what kind of product you should build.

We need to be in front of consumer trends and translate those trends into insights and foresights.

Empirical and observational data along with a healthy dash of intuition often have to be combined as business owners begin to look outward, not inward, at what solutions they can provide to their customers.

You can be a great researcher, and you can think you have great ideas, but until you're forced to talk to a potential customer, you never really know.

Through our effective campaign-management strategies, we're seizing opportunities to capture additional insights on customer behaviors, allowing us to reach and communicate with them more effectively.