Gillian Tans Quotes

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

We all have jobs in our lives that we must get done. We reach out and bring products into our lives to get these jobs done. Marketing is all about asking, 'What job is the customer trying to accomplish?'

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

Best Buy is just too Western! They do not stock enough Chinese brands, and Chinese people do not want to buy foreign brands.

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.

In China's big cities, American products - say, for instance, Proctor and Gamble shampoos or many other goods - are widely coveted by a lot of Chinese consumers.

We have a lot of customers in Japan, but they don't quite get the local content that they always need, so we want to encourage all of our product teams to start thinking globally.

Well I think any designer that can understand what people need to be wearing right now is the biggest and best step that you can take. Instead of putting your ego first, you put the buyer first. And I think that that's a really important thing just to know what the consumer is wanting to wear.

Most of all, I discovered that in order to succeed with a product you must truly get to know your customers and build something for them.

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.

When we have a corporation, we must know what the customer wants, what the customers needs. Also, the politician must know what the people want, what the people need.

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

First and foremost, localization is a customer strategy, it's not a cost arbitrage or whatever.

We basically built a pricing model that surgically identified what people wanted to pay us for and what they didn't want to pay us for. One of the things we figured out early on was that we could create value for people by creating a product that allowed them to design something that they couldn't design without us.

When you understand your customer base, you have to provide them with what they 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?

... the thing we see wrong with YC apps most frequently, is that people have not thought about the market first and what people want first.

We had Chinese artists that would put in elements for the Chinese audience like the calligraphy actually means something so the audience when they read it they'll understand. So there were definitely little things we were able to do that specifically leveraged the artists' talents.

It's not the consumers' job to figure out 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.

Think about the market, think about the design, and think about who is going to design for that market. Hit the mark.

Don't find customers for your products, find products for your customers.

Creating demand is hard. Filling demand is easier. Don't create a product, then seek someone to sell it to. Find a market - define your customers - then find or develop a product for them.

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.