Thom Mayne Quotes

People don’t know what they want until they see it.

You're not supposed to give people what they want, you're supposed to give them what they don't know that they want yet.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side.

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

People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on marketing research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

We need to listen to consumers' needs.

My work is more about trying to ask good questions and not trying to come up with big shows. Every fashion company is doing that, every car company is doing that.

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.

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.

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

At the core, Philips is an innovation company. And for innovation to work, you need to look for the unmet needs.

Using science to tell us what customers are looking for is second nature for us here.

They[ Lana and Andy Wachowski]are true artists. They really are trying to say something and trying to create something original, and there aren't that many people who do that.

I think the Macintosh was created by a group of people who felt that ah there wasn't a strict vision between sort of science and art.

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.

It is the new and different that is always most vulnerable to market research.

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

Anything new and different is most susceptible to market research.

I want to do something different, really different, and if it alienates people that's too bad.

I just want to build great products.

It's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them.

I didn't want to imitate anybody. Any movement I knew, I didn't want to use.

People who leave their own time out of their work cannot be surprised if their time fails to find them interesting.

If I did what has already been done, I would be a plagiarist and would consider myself unworthy; so I do something different and people call me a scoundrel. I'd rather be a scoundrel than a plagiarist!