Richard Quest Quotes

Business reporting is not dealing with objects, it is dealing with relationships between objects.

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

I love market research because you really have an idea of what your consumers are looking for.

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.

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

The key to our business, it's a lot of research.

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

The owner of a company with supertight margins - say, a restaurant, retailer, or producer of commodity goods - would be a fool not to keep a close eye on the numbers. But when I make big decisions, numbers are seldom, if ever, the tiebreaker.

You can't make good decisions without knowing the business.

You see, I used to do a certain amount of market research by going to the local drugstore and seeing what the truck drivers would put up. Now it's all just copies from the latest best-seller list and damn little of anything else.

Businesses make decisions based on what they are seeing in their order books.

My ma is an economist. My dad is a software engineer.

We believe there is no fundamental structural changes in the young-adult market. There are, of course, fashion changes, and the success of each brand depends on the accuracy with which it predicts those changes.

Follow sound business trends, not fashion trends.

I don't believe that the public knows what it wants; this is the conclusion that I have drawn from my career.

How do you know what people value? Well, you watch what they buy. How do we know what products to create? Well, it's based on what they value.

When better business decisions are made, economists won't make them.

It is a truth universally acknowledged on Wall Street that original research is on life support. Serious research can be bad for business, as well as expensive.

When I first got into business, I made a lot of bad decisions.

All entrepreneurs make decisions. Some will go right, and some will not go that right.

You take the noise and put it in data information knowledge, and you get insight from that knowledge. How to execute the trade, the timing, sizing, long, short, and then you risk manage it.

There just doesn't seem to be a market for something with aspiration anymore.

When producers want to know what the public wants, they graph it as curves. When they want to tell the public what to get, they say it in curves.

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.'

I consider a merchant someone who has a certain intuition and instinct, and - very important - knows how to run a business, knows the numbers.