"Every major industry was once a growth industry…In every case, the reason growth is threatened, slowed, or stopped is not because the market is saturated. It is because there has been a failure of management."
"The railroads did not stop growing because the need for passenger and freight transportation declined…They let others take customers away from them because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business."
"The DuPonts and the Cornings have succeeded not primarily because of their product or research orientation but because they have been thoroughly customer oriented also. It is constant watchfulness for opportunities to apply their technical know-how to the creation of customer-satisfying uses that accounts for their prodigious output of successful new products. Without a very sophisticated eye on the customer, most of their new products might have been wrong, their sales methods useless."
"In truth, there is no such thing as a growth industry, I believe. There are only companies organized and operated to create and capitalize on growth opportunities…Industries that assume themselves to be riding some automatic growth escalator invariably descend into stagnation."
"In the days of the kerosene lamp, the oil companies competed with each other and against gaslight by trying to improve the illuminating characteristics of kerosene. Then suddenly the impossible happened. Edison invented a light that was totally nondependent on crude oil. Had it not been for the growing use of kerosene in space heaters, the incandescent lamp would have completely finished oil as a growth industry at that time. Oil would have been good for little else than axle grease."
"The best way for a firm to be lucky is to make its own luck. That requires knowing what makes a business successful. One of the greatest enemies of this knowledge is mass production."
"Mass production does indeed generate great pressure to "move" the product. But what usually gets emphasized is selling, not marketing. Marketing, a more sophisticated and complex process, gets ignored."
"Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller's need to convert the product into cash, marketing with 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."
"The more usual way is to take the costs and then determine the price; and although that method may be scientific in a narrow sense, it is not scientific in the broad sense, because what earthly use is it to know the cost if it tells you that you cannot manufacture at a price at which the article can be sold?"
"It [oil company] has to think of itself as taking care of customer needs, not finding, refining, or even selling oil. Once it geniunely thinks of its business as taking care of people's transportation needs, nothing can stop it from creating its own extravagantly profitable growth."
"The irony of some industries oriented towards technical research and development is that the scientists who occupy the high executive positions are totally unscientific when it comes to defining their companies' overall needs and purposes. They violate the first two rules of the scientific method: being aware of and defining their companies' problems and then developing testable hypotheses about solving them. They are scientific only about the convenient things, such as laboratory and product experiments."
"The organization must learn to think of itself not as producing goods or services but as buying customers, as doing the things that will make people want to do business with it."
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