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Steve Jobs on Exit vs. Voice

October 11, 2011

One man’s focus group is another man’s ballot box:

“For something this complicated, it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

Notice he didn’t say, “impose it upon them.” Or, try this:

“This is what customers pay us for–to sweat all these details so it’s easy and pleasant for them to use our computers. We’re supposed to be really good at this. That doesn’t mean we don’t listen to customers, but it’s hard for them to tell you what they want when they’ve never seen anything remotely like it.”

 

2 Comments
  1. October 13, 2011 7:57 am

    The point is that marketing research fails to capture the customers needs because the consumers dont realy know themselfs what thow needs are. That is why entrepreneurial marketing using the entrepreneurs intuition is better suited for radical innovation. Steve Jobs was a master at sensing what the consumer’s needs were and in that way he was a great innovator.
    Hopefully, one day there will be somebody who has the right intuition to fulfill the needs of the consumers of competative government, and in that way will bring radical innovation that changes the way people think about government.

  2. twistedone151 permalink
    October 12, 2011 4:07 am

    Note, however, that Jobs wasn’t competing against a government.

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