Steve Madden Quotes

When looking at trends I always ask myself basic and timeless questions about business, and the one I seem to always come back to is, 'How is this different than anything else in the marketplace?'

Even if someone is already in your market space, ask yourself whether you can approach it from a different angle and thereby secure your own customer base.

A strategy delineates a territory in which a company seeks to be unique.

What is your Unique Selling Proposition? What makes you different than your competitors? Wrap your advertising message around that USP and communicate it in a clear and concise manner.

You need to understand the market, know how you can differentiate yourself in it, and grasp the price and the functional differentiation competitive points that are going to allow you to be disruptive.

We are always focused on how can we differentiate ourselves. In today's world, where people are gravitating toward experiences, it is even more important.

I get a lot of the time, 'We don't know how to market you,' or, 'You're too big.' Or, 'We have one of you already,'. But you don't have one of me already; you don't have a seven-foot, lovable guy. You don't have that.

Auto companies need to quickly separate the stuff that will be swallowed by commodity from the brand stuff.

You really need a unique selling proposition, and people need to care about that unique selling proposition.

Positioning should be decided before the advertising is created

I don't really like to call myself a brand, and I don't like to think of myself as a brand. I'm a singer, a songwriter, a musician and a performer. And an actress, and all the other things that I do. When you add it all together, some might call it a brand, but that's not my focus.

Things that we need to learn are the importance of establishing brand, establishing market presence. Technology-wise, it's things like ease of use, user interfaces; all of these things that tend to be less important in our other business segments are important things for us in the consumer market.

Leverage your brand. You shouldn't let two guys in a garage eat your shorts.

When you start losing market share, it's really tough to gain it back; you need the product portfolio and presence in many markets.

No matter how skillful you are, you can't invent a product advantage that doesn't exist. And if you do, and it's just a gimmick, it's going to fall apart anyway.

Successful candidates follow a simple fundamental rule: Define yourself before your opponent can define you.

The marketers can compete with free; it just has to be better. Look at bottled water if you don't believe me.

I look at companies as price-players or quality-players. The only way to go with J.Crew was quality.

The enterprise market is never winner-take-all.

My books didn't fit a marketing niche.

In a marketplace where it's so easy to produce products, where your competitors can essentially match you on the product itself, you need to have something else. You need to have an added value, and that added value is the identity, the idea behind your brand.

I know only a few ways to take market share and drive new revenue. I can engineer better products and services, I can build better relationships with my customers and deliver a higher level of service, or I can give my customers a lower price.

I'm not trying to build my own brand.

If Nintendo asks consumers to pay more money than the other platforms, then it's Nintendo's mission to provide the added value for which the people are willing to pay. In order to do that, we must remain unique and cannot be reproduced somewhere else.

At Sterling, we're not looking to become a dominating factor in the market. We're looking for an area to carve out for ourselves. We want to become another BMW.