If it’s compelling and engaging enough, customers will consider paying for it. If we don’t deliver something that has value, we won’t expect value in return.
Customers are enormously punishing when companies don’t meet their expectations.
I almost never invest in ideas or plans, so you’ll need to have a company and at least a product, if not customers.
Customers are now driven by trying to optimize value.
The fashion industry now has a direct relationship with its customers. Thanks to things like Twitter, ideas can be shared and circulated.
Our view is that younger customers love our digital offering, our mobile banking applications and so on. Older customers expect relationship managers and want much more personal attention in terms of their needs.
We want to show all of our customers that the industry standards that we had been employing before – which are considered great standards – were not good enough.
We’re trying to make the music service a cultural point of reference, and that’s why we’re making video. We’re making video for our Apple Music customers and our future customers.
As we look ahead, we see increasing opportunities for Duke in natural gas – not just for producing electricity, but in providing gas for our customers. We have been investing in renewables as well throughout the U.S.
If one asserts that buying customers below what they charge them is a corporate strategy, this is in essence an arbitrage game, and arbitrage games rarely last.
Every day, we’re learning about what’s happened with global warming and what’s happening all around the world, and our employees and our customers are really feeling that it’s time to step up and make a difference.
We recognized early on that media consumption was evolving and customers were looking for moving images to include as part of their advertising campaigns, website designs and corporate presentations.
You have to have what your customers need because if you don’t have what your customers need, you’re not going to have customers.
I’m not a tech guy. I’m looking at the technology with the eyes of my customers, normal people’s eyes.
Low prices at Walmart are a given. Customers almost take that for granted. But they also want to save time, and that goal is increasing in importance relative to just saving money.
Starting my own business was kind of a wakeup call in a number of different ways. I had to meet a payroll every week, and we had to satisfy customers, and we had competitors that we had to compete with in order to have those customers come into our stores, and we had to compete with other employers for our employees.
Competition is good because we need to educate customers, and Ozon.ru itself will not be able to do it.
They will come to learn in the end, at their own expense, that it is better to endure competition for rich customers than to be invested with monopoly over impoverished customers.
Software innovation, like almost every other kind of innovation, requires the ability to collaborate and share ideas with other people, and to sit down and talk with customers and get their feedback and understand their needs.
Sproxil will help combat the multi-billion dollar counterfeit drug market, empower customers, and give them the resources to make informed pharmaceutical purchasing decisions.
It is important to remember the purpose of health care reform: to make sure Americans have access to quality, affordable health care – especially those individuals who were being denied by their insurance companies because they weren’t profitable customers.
My view is make Indian manufacturing competitive, and if it is competitive, it can serve customers or consumers anywhere.
There are lots of things about Amazon for which they deserve credit. They’re innovative. There are lots of very, very happy Amazon customers. I’m not here to dispute that Amazon has been personally good for me or to say that they haven’t been, so far, good to their customers.
We make a significant effort at Oracle to focus the organization on making customers successful in how they deploy Oracle technology and transform their business through IT.
Business has to stand up on behalf of its employees, on behalf of immigration, on behalf of its customers, and on behalf of supply chain-cum-globalization.
Mobile gaming is the largest and fastest-growing opportunity for interactive entertainment, and we will have one of the world’s most successful mobile game companies and its talented teams providing great content to new customers, in new geographies, throughout the world.
It all comes back to the basics. Serve customers the best-tasting food at a good value in a clean, comfortable restaurant, and they’ll keep coming back.
Customers are willing to try new things, and if you can survive, you will have fewer competitors. It’s like entering the eye of the storm. As long as you are strong enough to survive, you can end up in still water by yourself.
We also had good software in the key categories and more focus on the gameplaying capability, so more of the marketing effort was targeted at game customers.
Creating a strong company culture isn’t just good business. It’s the right thing to do, and it makes your company better for all stakeholders – employees, management, and customers.
A healthy corporation acts on the interests of its stakeholders and customers.
Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.
I myself, as well as Toyota, am not perfect. I, more than anyone, wish for our customers’ cars to be safe.
What part of media doesn’t need to connect with their customers more smartly?
It took us three years to build the NeXT computer. If we’d given customers what they said they wanted, we’d have built a computer they’d have been happy with a year after we spoke to them – not something they’d want now.
Don’t focus on reaching the C-Suite. Focus on doing great work and serving your customers and community. That’s how you can find the right opportunities and get the skills and experience to get to the top in your career.
Dog-fooding is using your own products so that you understand from inside out what it is you’re providing the customers. It’s another way to gain insights and to gain intelligence. You use it yourself; you eat your own dog food. Every time we do that, we discover something that we can improve.
At a lot of companies founded on principles, the notion of making money is almost antithetical to the ethos of the place. From the very beginning, our business has existed to meet the needs and desires of multiple constituencies: customers, team members, vendors, shareholders, the community.
Going forward, we are mindful of the challenges we face in the competitive retail landscape, but we have demonstrated that our concept of building compelling brands that focus on the customers’ lifestyles can produce superior results. We will not waver from that concept.
We have 11 great potato flavors, and customers have been clamoring for tortilla. For over a year, we worked to develop the four flavors of tortilla popchips: chili limon, nacho cheese, ranch and salsa. They’re made with traditional stoneground masa, are gluten-free, and have less than half the fat of other chips.
In addition to transitioning to the cloud, our customers continue to invest in premium versions of our on-prem server products like Window Server, System Center and SQL Server.
Any time a bar or chef cares more about their own ego than the tastes and comforts of their customers, they should just open a monument to themselves and not a business.
The goal of listening to customers is not to please every one of them. It’s to figure out which customer segments serve your needs – both short and long term.
The reality is that most companies are not about any values at all – they are about making money. It is extremely rare for a business to stand for anything because most businesses don’t want to alienate potential customers, and if you believe in anything you are going to alienate someone.
Leaders must exemplify integrity and earn the trust of their teams through their everyday actions. When you do this, you set high standards for everyone at your company. And when you do so with positive energy and enthusiasm for shared goals and purpose, you can deeply connect with your team and customers.
My entrepreneurial spirit happened all day long because I got to think of things that kids would interact with. I was in front of my customers for 6-8 hours a day. I got to see what they like, what they don’t like, what they connected with, and most importantly, did they learn something from this?
Your customers can tell you the things that are broken and how they want to be made happy. Listen to them. Make them happy. But don’t rely on them to create the future road map for your product or service. That’s your job.
If you had a hobby, family, or wanted to do things besides work – you should join VMware. We didn’t have nearly as long hours as Google given our customers worked normal business hours.
When I was born, my father owned a business called a ‘reading circle’; folders containing an assortment of magazines were lent to customers for one week, then recollected and lent out again. The older the folder, the lower was the fee. This was a flourishing branch of industry.
At Microsoft, we’re aspiring to have a living, learning culture with a growth mindset that allows us to learn from ourselves and our customers. These are the key attributes of the new culture at Microsoft, and I feel great about how it seems to be resonating and how it’s seen as empowering.
