Quotes About Customers

Great entrepreneurs are often great listeners and they can spot patterns and pick up on small details in customer stories.

The key for us is to have assets that are easy for people to get to and they want to use. So Go90 right out of the gate will have certain things that are exclusive to Verizon, but you can download it if you're a Sprint customer or T-Mobile customer, and they're doing that. Things like the AwesomenessTV - exclusive content.

A healthy corporation acts on the interests of its stakeholders and customers.

Through their own actions, customers can hold companies responsible to higher standards of social responsibility. Through collective action, they can leverage their dollars to combat the force of those investors who myopically pursue profits at the expense of the rest of society.

HCL is a corporation. It is for profits. A corporation stands for its shareholders, its profits, its employees, its discoveries, and its customers.

Sham Harga had run a succesful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease and burnt crunchy bits.

I think good companies can navigate being public and doing the right things for their customers.

Being frugal, conscious of making money, is not a negative thing. That sensibility of creating value and finding value and reinvesting in those customers is what separates great restaurants from the average ones.

We think, over the long term, the real key to value of a bank is does it have true deposits from true long-term customers? People who actually know the bank, live in the neighborhood, work there, maybe have a mortgage there, credit card... That, to us, is the key to a bank.

I've learned several lessons over the years. First, never take yourself too seriously, or work is boring. Next, people make the difference. You can have great technology, but if it's not complemented by great people, it won't go anywhere. Finally, customers buy from people they like.

For years, broadcasters didn't get a nickel out of retransmission consent. But broadcast content is what the cable industry was selling to customers.

As I travel across Illinois and talk with people, and as others reach out to my office desperate for help, I am becoming convinced that, despite their rhetoric, many lenders have no interest in actually helping their customers.

None of that data, however, actually tells you why customers make the choices that they do.

Disruptive innovations, in contrast, don't attempt to bring better products to established customers in existing markets. Rather, they disrupt and redefine that trajectory by introducing products and services that are not as good as currently available products. But disruptive technologies offer other benefits—typically, they are simpler, more convenient, and less expensive products that appeal to new or less-demanding customers.3

This is one of the innovator's dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.

Predictable marketing requires an understanding of the circumstances in which customers buy or use things. Specifically, customers—people and companies—have "jobs" that arise regularly and need to get done. When customers become aware of a job that they need to get done in their lives, they look around for a product or service that they can "hire" to get the job done.

Focus is scary—until you realize that it only means turning your back on markets you could never have anyway. Sharp focus on jobs that customers are trying to get done holds the promise of greatly improving the odds of success in new-product development.

Disruptive technologies bring to a market a very different value proposition than had been available previously. Generally, disruptive technologies underperform established products in mainstream markets. But they have other features that a few fringe (and generally new) customers value. Products based on disruptive technologies are typically cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use. There

There are whole industries, such as venture capital, that are currently organized around the belief that innovation is essentially a game of playing the odds. But it's time to topple that tired paradigm. I've spent twenty years gathering evidence so that you can put your time, energy, and resources into creating products and services that you can predict, in advance, customers will be eager to hire. Leave relying on luck to the other guys.

Innovation is less about producing something new and more about enabling something new and important for customers.

the innovator's dilemma: Should we invest to protect the least profitable end of our business, so that we can retain our least loyal, most price-sensitive customers? Or should we invest to strengthen our position in the most profitable tiers of our business, with customers who reward us with premium prices for better products?

Principle #1: Companies Depend on Customers and Investors for Resources

managers may think they control the flow of resources in their firms, in the end it is really customers and investors who dictate how money will be spent because companies with investment patterns that don't satisfy their customers and investors don't survive.

In fact, the prospects for growth and improved profitability in upmarket value networks often appear to be so much more attractive than the prospect of staying within the current value network, that it is not unusual to see well-managed companies leaving (or becoming uncompetitive with) their original customers as they search for customers at higher price points.