Great Throughts Treasury

"Unless you know where you are going, any road will take you there."

"An industry begins with the customer and his or her needs, not with a patent, a raw material, or a selling skill."

"An industry is a customer-satisfying process, not a goods-producing process. Businesses will do better in the end if they concentrate on meeting customers’ needs rather than on selling products."

"Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things."

"Given what is everywhere the purpose of commerce, the global company will shape the vectors of technology and globalization into its great strategic fecundity. It will systematically push these vectors toward their own convergence, offering everyone simultaneously high-quality, more or less standardized products at optimally low prices, thereby achieving for itself vastly expanded markets and profits. Companies that do not adapt to the new global realities will become victims of those that do."

"Companies stop growing because of a failure in management, not because the market is saturated but because of myopia."

"In truth there is no such thing as a growth industry."

"Just as energy is the basis of life itself, and ideas the source of innovation, so is innovation the vital spark of all human change, improvement and progress."

"Management must think of itself not as producing products but as providing customer-creating value satisfactions”, in other words: “buying customer.”"

"Many people who are full of ideas simply do not understand how an organization must operate in order to get things done."

"Organizations tend to be inhospitable to creativity and innovation."

"People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole."

"Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer: Selling consists of tricks and techniques focusing on the seller’s need to convert the product into cash. Marketing is dedicated to the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering, and, finally, consuming it."

"Ideas are useless unless used. The proof of their value is in their implementation. Until then, they are in limbo."

"In spite of the extraordinary outpouring of totally and partially new products and new ways of doing things that we are witnessing today, by far the greatest flow of newness is not innovation at all. Rather, it is imitation."

"The future belongs to people who see possibilities before they become obvious."

"The globalization of markets is at hand. With that, the multinational commercial world nears its end, and so does the multinational corporation."

"The modern global corporation contrasts powerfully with the aging multinational corporation. Instead of adapting to superficial and even entrenched differences within and between nations, it will seek sensibly to force suitably standardized products and practices on the entire globe. They are exactly what the world will take, if they also come with low prices, high quality and blessed reliability. The global company will operate, in this regard, precisely as Henry Kissinger wrote in Years of Upheaval about the continuing Japanese economic success - "voracious in its collection of information, impervious to pressure, and implacable in execution.""

"There is no such thing as a commodity. All goods and services are differentiable. Though the usual presumption is that this is more true of consumer goods than industrial goods and services, the opposite is the actual case."

"Two vectors shape the world - technology and globalization. The first helps determine human preferences; the second, economic realities. Regardless of how much preferences evolve and diverge, they also gradually converge and form markets where economies of scale lead to reduction of costs and prices."

"A powerful force drives the world toward a converging commonality, and that force is technology. ? Almost everyone everywhere wants all the things they have heard about, seen, or experienced via the new technologies."

"Almost everyone everywhere wants all the same things they have heard about, seen, or experienced via the new technologies. ? If a company forces costs and prices down, and pushes quality and reliability up ? while maintaining reasonable concern for suitability ? customers will prefer its world-standardized products."

"And of course, he ends with explaining that it is all about corporate leadership."

"Business is not physics. Making clever decisions requires experience. Knowledge is not enough."

"Cosmopolitanism is no longer the monopoly of the intellectual and leisure classes; it is becoming the established property and defining characteristic of all sectors everywhere in the world."

"Differentiation is one of the most important strategic and tactical activities in which companies must constantly engage."

"Differentiation represents an imaginative response to the existence of potential customers in such a way as to give them compelling reasons to want to do business with the originating supplier. To differentiate an offering effectively requires knowing what drives and attracts customers. It requires knowing how customers differ from one another and how those differences can be clustered into commercially meaningful segments."

"Each of these reconceptualizations found a deeper meaning in customer behavior, thus causing marketing programs to be reshaped in ways better to attract and hold customers. To attract a customer, you are asking him to do something different from what he would have done in absence of the programs you direct at him. He has to change his mind and his actions. The customer must shift his behavior in the direction advocated by the seller. Hence the seller must distinguish himself and his offering from those of others so that people will want, or at least prefer, to do business with him. The search for meaningful distinction is a central part of the marketing effort. If marketing is seminally about anything, it is about achieving customer-getting distinction by differentiating what you do and how you operate. All else is derivative of that and only that."

"Every way leads to your goal if you do not know where you're going"

"Good data about customers, converted meaningfully into good information, have the power to improve strategic decisions in the right directions. Strategic planning can be mechanistically, and therefore incorrectly, defined as deciding how to allocate resources among the possibilities of what's to be done. This definition is incorrect, because it presumes that these possibilities are self-evident. They are not. It is wrong to say that the most important and creatively challenging act of corporate decision-making is about choices regarding what's to be done. The most important and challenging work involves thinking up the possibilities from among which choices have to be made. To select among stipulated possibilities is to make choices of preferences, not decisions about appropriateness. A possibility has to be created before it can be chosen. Therefore to think up the possibilities from which choices might be made is to engage in acts of creative imagination."

"Good marketing is the constant watchfulness for opportunities to apply the business?s technical know-how to the creation of customer-satisfying uses."

"Ideas can be willed, and the imagination is their engine."

"If a company?s own research does not make its product obsolete, another?s will."

"If an organization does not know or care where it is going, it does not need to advertise that fact with a ceremonial figurehead. Everybody will notice it soon enough."

"If you?re not thinking segments, you are not thinking marketing."

"If you're not thinking segments, you're not thinking. To think segments means you have to think about what drives customers, customer groups, and the choices that are or might be available to them. To think segments means to think beyond what's obviously out there to see. If everybody sees segments as obviously consisting of certain demographics, industries, user groups, buying practices, certain influencing groups, and the like, then the thinking that gives real power is thinking that transcends the ordinary?"

"In marketing? the object is to get and keep a customer, and also to get existing buyers to prefer to do business with you rather than your competitors. In marketing, therefore, the imagination must constantly focus on that objective? The essence of competition?is differentiation: providing something different and providing it better than your competitor. Sometimes even an obvious functional difference doesn't sell unless it is also presented or positioned differently? Let us repeat: The purpose of a business is to get and keep a customer. Without customers, no amount of engineering wizardry, clever financing, or operations expertise can keep a company going. To be the low-cost producer? to have the best salesmen of what's not wanted or wanted only by the few whose ability to pay won't even pay for the overhead ? these can't save you from extinction. To do well what should not be done is to do badly."

"Innovation is not the product of logical thought, although the result is tied to logical structure."

"Innovation is the ability to see change as an opportunity - not a threat."

"Innovation is the specific instrument of entrepreneurship. The act that endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth."

"Japanese companies have discovered the one great thing that all markets have in common ? an overwhelming desire for dependable, world-standard modernity in all things, at aggressively low prices."

"Kodak sells film, but they don't advertise film. They advertise memories."

"Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow."

"Marketing is inescapable in the determination of corporate results. The reason is that marketing deals with the sources and levels of the revenues that help determine the corporate fate. Since marketing means getting and keeping customers in some acceptable proportion relative to competitors, it is to the marketing imagination one must look to gain differential advantage over competitors. Assuming that the costs of what it sells are reasonably competitive, it remains the burden of the marketing imagination to find ways to attract and hold customers. It usually takes a lot of long and sweaty effort to get things done, and that itself may take a lot of imagination. But unless the decision as to what to do is appropriate, which is to say, unless it is imaginatively right, nothing can save the enterprise from disaster. Good work in pursuit of wrong purposes is more damaging than bad work in pursuit of right purposes. In business, the marketing imagination is the central tool for deciding on what the purposes are to be."

"Never before in history has innovation offered promise of so much to so many in so short a time."

"Nothing drives progress like the imagination. The idea precedes the deed. The only exceptions are accidents and natural selection, but these cannot be willed. Ideas can be willed, and the imagination is their engine. Though progress starts with the imagination, only work can make things happen. And work itself works best when fueled, again, by the imagination. An idea or a new conceptualization usually requires the imaginative application of effort to get the intended result. Thus the imagination gets the idea and then, to be effective, must help convert it into results."

"So-called ethnic markets are a good example. Chinese food, pita bread, country and western music, pizza and jazz are everywhere. They are market segments that exist in worldwide proportions. They don?t deny or contradict global homogenization but confirm it."

"Strategic planning involves defining what's to be done. It is inescapably rooted in marketing matters, in the need to respond to realities, the actualities of the market's unyielding requisites. To get done what strategic planning has decided to do requires realistic plans for implementation at the center of the competitive vortex. If the plans are not realistic, and if those who must convert the plans into action are not persuaded regarding their feasibility, the results will be disastrous. Subordinates will, perhaps grudgingly, carry out plans and programs they think are silly or wrong. But they will not seriously attempt to implement plans and programs they think are not realistic, that is, not implementable?"

"Strategic planning involves defining what's to be done, the allocation of resources for their maximization. Maximization is, and must inevitably be, getting the desired results in the market place?To decide correctly what's to be done and how to do it requires having good data about customers, competitors, and markets. Even more, it requires the imaginative conversion of these data into meaningful and usable information. The best way is to know your prospects in a way that is more fundamental and compelling than what's usually yielded by the purely metrical methods so common in market research today."

"The difference between data and information is that while data are crudely aggregated collections of raw facts, information represents the selective organization and imaginative interpretation of those facts."