Marketing Quotes (3 quotes)
[Why people buy quarter-inch drill bits.] They don't want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.
As quoted in Theodore Levitt, The Marketing Imagination (1983, 1986), 128. The quote is sometimes attributed to Theodore Levitt, who popularized it. If you know biographical information about Leo McGinneva, please contact Webmaster.
Many inventions are not suitable for the people at large because of their carelessness. Before a thing can be marketed to the masses, it must be made practically fool-proof. Its operation must be made extremely simple. That is one reason, I think, why the phonograph has been so universally adopted. Even a child can operate it. … Another reason is that people are far more willing to pay for being amused than for anything else.
As quoted from an interview by B.C. Forbes in The American Magazine (Jan 1921), 86.
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.
In 'Marketing Myopia' originally published in Harvard Business Review (). Reprinted in Harvard Business Review Classics: Marketing Myopia (2008), 66-71.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
