Business Titan Marketing Views Are Still Relevant

12 Business Executives’ Marketing Quotes

Strong marketing, at its core, comes from an understanding of your business objectives, your customers and their needs. The marketer’s need to track progress towards goals by using appropriate metrics is ageless. To prove that, here are marketing-related quotes from twelve business titans that remain relevant.

  1. Jeff Bezos (Amazon): “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.” In today’s competitive market, where consumer trust is gone, this is even more true. Companies build their reputation every day with every interaction. Jeff Bezos led the way by implementing customer reviews at Amazon. The subtext is: don’t trust what we say, listen to your peers.
  2. Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway): “Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it’s not going to get the business.” Customers and investors expect quality products to deliver on their promise. A great product or service is a must for marketing, especially in the social media ecosystem.
  3. Peter Drucker (Author): “The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.“  At its core, marketing is driven by customers’ needs and desires. To this end, it’s critical to engage with your customers and, once you understand them, create a product that fulfills that need.
  4. Henry Ford (Ford):  “A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one.
”  There’s no substitute for strong products especially in today’s social media ecosystem where customers not only talk to their friends and family, they talk to other customers and leave messages for people who aren’t yet in market.
  5. Milton Hershey (Hershey’s): “Give them quality, that’s the best kind of advertising.”  Like the strong product Henry Ford referenced, customers want quality products and will talk about them with their family, friends and social graph. Customers will remember problems with your service and product quality.
  6. Tony Hsieh (Zappos): Profits are like oxygen. You need it to survive, but ultimately what matters is passion, growth, and a higher purpose. To succeed, you must integrate Tony Hsieh’s perspective into every step of a business. It’s helpful to have an element that distinguishes your business from your competitors. For Zappos, this was their customer service.
  7. Lee Iacocca (Chrysler): “You can have brilliant ideas, but if you can not get them across, your ideas will not get you anywhere.”  You must make your business plans in a way that enables everyone to understand and implement them.
  8. Ray Kroc (McDonalds):  “Early to bed, early to rise, advertise, advertise, advertise.” 
 To build your brand, you need to keep your name in front of your prospects and customers. With social media marketing, this translates to using content to engage customers at every step of the purchase process.
  9. David Packard (HP): “Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.
”  This quote could be written today about how social media marketing is evolving into social business. Marketing your business or brand isn’t about one product or one campaign. It’s about developing the best product that you can to meet your target audience’s needs and delivering to them at the optimal price. From this perspective, marketing is integrated into every step of the production and sales process.
  10. John Rockefeller (Chase Bank):  “Next to doing the right thing, the most important thing is to let people know you are doing the right thing.”
 The subtext here is you must build your name, brand and/or reputation by letting the public know who you are and what you’ve done for them.
  11. John Scully (Coca-Cola & Apple): “No great marketing decisions have ever been made on qualitative data.” At its core, marketing is about achieving business objectives by fulfilling customer needs. While  brand monitoring tools can alert you to issues, the real challenge is discovering what your prospects and customers think they want. Often, it can be options that you never thought of offering. Today’s social media world makes this process easier to implement with a variety of social sharing tools. For example, Starbuck’s my idea.
  12. Donald Trump: “Without passion, you don’t have energy; without energy, you have nothing. Nothing great in the world has been accomplished without passion.”  Love him or hate him, Donald Trump has done an amazing job of building his personal brand despite professional and personal setbacks. He’s got it right: business requires passion regardless of what your goals are. You need to get both your employees and your customers excited about your offering.

As a marketer, it’s important to translate these words of wisdom to your business. You must be able to set your business apart from your competitors in a way that gives today’s social media empowered consumers a reason to purchase from your firm.

What words of wisdom or quotes does your business thrive on? How does this influence your marketing?

Happy marketing,
Heidi Cohen


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