Market Research Quotes

There is very little sense that anybody really knows what works or why. But that's not a shock. And I don't think market research would solve that.

We don't believe in market research for a new product unknown to the public. So we never do any.

Do your own market research; ask your last ten customers exactly why they bought from you.

The paradox of Steve Jobs's career is that he had no interest in listening to consumers - he was famously dismissive of market research - yet nonetheless had an amazing sense of what consumers actually wanted.

Anything new and different is most susceptible to market research.

Carefully watch how people live, get an intuitive sense as to what they might want and then go with it. Don’t do market research.

I don't really follow market research. In the end, I respond to my own instincts.

People are unlikely to know that they need a product which does not exist and the basis of market research in new and innovative products is limited in this regard.

You don't market-research a novel; you really are writing it for yourself. It's a hobby, in many ways. The problem becomes what you do when you're confronted by criticism. You just don't listen to it.

Money won't buy happiness, but it will pay the salaries of a large research staff to study the problem.

USA Today has come out with a new survey - apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population.

Intrinsic value follows meaning follows form follows economics follows function follows more economics follows market research.

The purely random sample is the only kind that can be examined with confidence by means of statistical theory, but there is one things wrong with it. It is so difficult and expensive to obtain for many uses that sheer cost eliminates it. A more economical substitute, which is almost universally used in such fields as opinion polling and market research, is called stratified random sampling.

Running a company on market research is like driving while looking in the rear view mirror.

The need to engage businesses and decision makers with customers can only increase in importance, and as it does, the market research industry must recognise that engagement is a facet of what we do.

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

About 85 percent of what you see is just because I get on the phone and [say], 'Let's go do this'. I don't do any market research or test groups or focus [groups]. I just go, 'It's my company; would I buy it, personally?'

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

I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.

Research is to see what everybody else has seen, and to think what nobody else has thought.

We only do what we think is good and what we're happy with. I do that in stand-up, I even do it with my children's books. I don't do market research, I don't have focus groups, I don't care. I don't care if it fails, honestly. I'd rather have something that's completely mine fail than something succeed that I'm not proud of.

Now death is uncool, old-fashioned. To my mind the defining characteristic of our era is spin, everything tailored to vanishing point by market research, brands and bands manufactured to precise specifications; we are so used to things transmuting into whatever we would like them to be that it comes as a profound outrage to encounter death, stubbornly unspinnable, only and immutably itself.

You'll learn more in a day talking to customers than a week of brainstorming, a month of watching competitors, or a year of market research.

Research is four things: brains with which to think, eyes with which to see, machines with which to measure and, fourth, money.

What is research but a blind date with knowledge?

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.

We think the Mac will sell zillions, but we didn't build the Mac for anybody else. We built it for ourselves. We were the group of people who were going to judge whether it was great or not. We weren't going to go out and do market research. We just wanted to build the best thing we could build.

On the day he unveiled the Macintosh, a reporter from Popular Science asked Jobs what type of market research he had done. Jobs responded by scoffing, "Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

Did Alexander Graham Bell do any market research before he invented the telephone?

A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make.

But this is where you get all the market research and things get in danger of becoming formulaic, and where you depend on brands and getting recognised actors. It's the thing that precludes risk very often, otherwise everyone would be avant-garde all over the place.

At the end of the process we called a market research company to find out whom the film was for or what was the target audience. We didn't have a lot of money to release the film, so in order for it to play in cinemas, which are dominated by films with much larger marketing budgets, we had to discover whom the film was for.

Basic research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing.

Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.

In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.

Accustomed to the veneer of noise, to the shibboleths of promotion, public relations, and market research, society is suspicious of those who value silence.

The theme of corporate stories (and millions drink them in every day) seldom varies: to be happy you must consume, to be special you must conform. Absurd, obviously, yet our identities have become so fragile, so elusive, that we seem content to let advertisers provide us with their version of who we are, to let them recreate us in their image: a cookie-cutter image based on market research, shallow sociology, and insidious lies.