The aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.
Don't find customers for your products, find products for your customers.
We don't want to push our ideas on to customers, we simply want to make what they want.
You define yourself by either what your clients want or what you believe they'll need for the future. So: Define yourself by your client, not your competitor.
Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariable does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs.
The oil industry is a stunning example of how science, technology, and mass production can divert an entire group of companies from their main task. ... No oil company gets as excited about the customers in its own backyard as about the oil in the Sahara Desert. ... But the truth is, it seems to me, that the industry begins with the needs of the customer for its products. From that primal position its definition moves steadily back stream to areas of progressively lesser importance until it finally comes to rest at the search for oil.
Obsess about customers, not competitors.
We're not competitor obsessed, we're customer obsessed. We start with the customer and we work backwards.
Businesses want to think in terms of categories. Consumers want us to think in terms of their needs.
We built this company from the customer back, not from the company out.
Everything starts with the customer.
At Netflix, we realized that we weren't in business with the Toshibas and the Sonys of the world. We were in business with the guy sitting at home trying to find a DVD to watch. If we had the courage to focus on him, everyone - movie studios, electronics companies, Netflix itself - won.
Core competence, as it is used by many managers, is a dangerously inward-looking notion. Competitiveness is far more about doing what customers value than doing what you think you're good at.
The consumer is the absolute king in everything you do.
Empirical and observational data along with a healthy dash of intuition often have to be combined as business owners begin to look outward, not inward, at what solutions they can provide to their customers.
True marketing starts...with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, "What do we want to sell?" It asks, "What does the customer want to buy?"
Proper business planning demands that you focus on the self-interest of the customer at all times.
Marketing is not only much broader than selling, it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business. It is the whole business seen from the point of view of its final result, that is, from the customer's point of view.
A romantic or classical view of the French approach would have been to say, 'It's a French company; let no one attack it. Let's block any merger. But the reality is Alcatel-Lucent is not a French company; it's a global company. Its main markets are China and the U.S. Its ownership is foreign; most of its managers aren't French.
If you stay very focused on customers and customer success, people pay attention to that - and in turn, they also want that same type of success.
Business enterprise is an organ of society. There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer.
There are probably no more market-oriented individuals on the planet, than low income people.
I think there's a need for somewhat of a mindset change. We need to have a consistent external focus. We've always had the research labs. We've always had the resources to be innovative, and we've been innovative in a number of businesses. But, in any big company, you have to constantly push people to look at markets and customers, rather than look internally at themselves.
For what we want to accomplish in the future, we have to be able to view everything from the eyes of the customer.
Customer-centricity is unbelievably important.
