Quotes about Market

I think that while markets are conversations, marketing is a story. Starbucks creates conversations among customers, so does Apple. The NYSE makes a fortune permitting people to interact with each other. But great marketing is storytelling, and if you’ve been to a Broadway show lately, you’ll notice that audience participation is discouraged. That doesn’t mean that great playwrights don’t listen! They do. They, like great marketers, listen relentlessly. They engage in offline conversations constantly. They poll and they do censuses and most important, they have true conversations with small groups of real people. But THEN, they tell a story.

Women spend 80 cents of every dollar in the marketplace. We could be the most powerful force for economic and environmental change in the 21st century if we focused our money where it could make the biggest difference. If a million people did that, it would have a $1 billion impact.

“(Big name research firm) says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.” Every entrepreneur has a few slides about how the market potential for his segment is tens of billions. It doesn't matter if the product is bar mitzah planning software or 802.11 chip sets. Venture capitalists don't believe this type of forecast because it's the fifth one of this magnitude that they've heard that day. Entrepreneurs would do themselves a favor by simply removing any reference to market size estimates from consulting firms.

...our market system depends critically on trust--trust in the word of our colleagues and trust in the word of those with whom we do business.

Entrepreneurs and management often spend years huddled in their chilly isolated caves, creating market competition drawings on white marker boards hung on the damp rocky walls.

Suppose hypothetically that one out of every 200 people or so is a jerk.  In today's world these jerks will discover that if they enter government or business they can become super rich and powerful jerks.  Do we conclude, therefore, that markets (or government) have caused greed?  No, the fact is that once we no longer live in tiny tribes of 200, anonymity allows some people, who would have been assholes in a small tribe but who would have been sanctioned there, to go off and become jerks on a much, much larger scale.

Technology, including Zaadz, will allow us to evade the jerks far more than we could before.  The technology-based social responsibility movement, broadly construed, will allow us to return to some extent to the moral monitoring of small villages.

“No one can do what we're doing.” If there's anything worse than the lack of a market and cluelessness, it's arrogance. No one else can do this until the first company does it, and ten others spring up in the next ninety days. Let's see, no one else ran a sub four-minute mile after Roger Bannister. (It took only a month before John Landy did). The world is a big place. There are lots of smart people in it. Entrepreneurs are kidding themselves if they think they have any kind of monopoly on knowledge. And, sure as I'm a Macintosh user, on the same day that an entrepreneur tells this lie, the venture capitalist will have met with another company that's doing the same thing.

“(Big name research firm) says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.” Every entrepreneur has a few slides about how the market potential for his segment is tens of billions. It doesn't matter if the product is bar mitzah planning software or 802.11 chip sets. Venture capitalists don't believe this type of forecast because it's the fifth one of this magnitude that they've heard that day. Entrepreneurs would do themselves a favor by simply removing any reference to market size estimates from consulting firms.

It's a familiar truism that at any one moment, financial markets are dominated by either fear or greed. But the healthiest markets are those that are animated by both fear and greed at the same time.