John Quelch Quotes

We opened a design center in the South of England last year as part of our strategy for being close to our customers and developing innovative products for exciting new markets.

You need to make certain decisions to expand your market.

As a brand, Ahla is one of Strauss-Elite's strongest. But we need to do a lot of marketing in order to regain market leadership. I have no doubt that we will do that, even if it takes time.

I go on Twitter and I ask my viewers, 'What would you like to see next season in my line?' or 'What are things you love to wear?' They're the ones wearing it, so I want to make sure it applies to them.

I was a VP of marketing, I was regional sales manager in fashion, and marketing director in communications and product development. I was always a corporate Fortune 500 girl.

I would say, as an entrepreneur everything you do - every action you take in product development, in marketing, every conversation you have, everything you do - is an experiment. If you can conceptualize your work not as building features, not as launching campaigns, but as running experiments, you can get radically more done with less effort.

Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.

Hammer down product fundamentals first. Make sure you've got something that works before doubling down on promotion and marketing. Create a groundswell of organic support, and only then leverage PR and advertising to spread the word.

I think the mistake people make most often when they invest in other kinds of startups is they say, 'This is totally different.' And so the things that matter, like making a product that people desperately want, like talking to customers, they throw this out the window. That is a recipe for heartache and tears.

The big companies are like, It's so good but we don't know how to market it.

I'm just interested in building a company that doesn't necessarily change lives but adapts people's behaviour.

Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happy. Listen to them. Make them happy. But don't rely on them to create the future road map for your product or service. That's your job.

Launching a successful product or startup has little to do with luck. Any business that gains traction on the market is the result of very careful strategizing and market analysis, not to mention the development of an original product or service.

In order for me to sell D.C., I have to have people understand us.

Before I became the president of AT&T's consumer division, I was running strategy and our internet services, so I was the president of one of the first internet service providers, ISPs, AT&T Worldnet, and running our internet protocol product development as well. So I knew a lot about what was going on with the internet.

I think it's about being really smart about hitting the right consumer product spaces at the right time.

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts

I was first hired at Staples in 1992, by company founder Tom Stemberg and eventual CEO Ron Sargent, to be the first director of marketing and merchandising for the catalog business.

Analysts have forgotten how to analyze business and they have forgotten how to be objective about them.

One thing I learned from all my years in business is you really have to work with the experts: you can launch something yourself, but unless you have the expertise and the marketing strategies and machinery behind you, you'll never be successful.

I enjoy looking at other people's products and learning from them. We take all of our competitors very seriously, as you know. You have to respect Intel. But we have our own tricks up our sleeves.

There are some keys to success in the fad business. One is never give up. You need total motivation and the right kind of creativity. You also have to back the right activity. It is a disaster if you back the wrong idea with your energy. You not only lose money, but you take a big social risk.

For me, I think Bob Iger is one of the smartest men in the country.

I've done strategic planning, all kind of cash flows, but in fad marketing, it is all really irrelevant. It is marketing by total gut feeling. There is no market research. You either sell 500 of something, and it is a total bomb, or you sell 500 million.

The reality is the world's shifted; the world's evolved. We now measure ourself by total device space. We have a much bigger opportunity than we've ever had in the past to grow our business, but we have to rethink how we look at our business.