Interesting Quotes Day 1

I decided to start (hopefully) daily running list of interesting, inspirational or just funny quotes. The first one is from Steve Jobs, who also recently passed away (such a sad month).

1. You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they'll want something new.

This quote is from the article "The Entrepreneur of the Decade" by Bo Burlingham and George Gendron for Inc.'s April 1, 1989 issue. Funny title when you ponder it from perspective. What should be interesting for marketers is the distinction between needs and wants that it underlines. I belief the cause of Apple's amazing turnaround has been precisely the understanding of universal needs. Wants can be culture or time specific, they are only one possible way of satisfying a need. Needs, on the other hand, are general and not related to a particular context. So no, it is not that Apple does not do market research - they simply look for the underlying need and come up with a new way to fill it. You could say that this is precisely the desired "feedforward" loop in research.