The degree of marketing research: from Henry Ford to Steve Job

In the early of 1900s, Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor, made a famous statement that if I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. Almost a century later, Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, said “it’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them”.

Both of the statements looks quite correct as the performance of both companies are the strongest evidence. For a long time, Ford occupied a large market share in American for a long time. For Apple, the announcement of iPods, iPhone and iPad still own a large market share in their areas.

However, this kind of success cannot last for a long time. In Ford case, when Japanese cars entered in American, the market share of Ford in America started to fall. In 2012, the market share of Ford in America is 16%, which is much lower than decades before.  The main advantage of Japanese Motor companies is they build their products based on what customer want. For example, they sell cars of good quality and gas consumption with a cheap price. They care about what customers want. In the Apple case, Steve Jobs create the industry of tablet, change the industry of cell phone and music player. Now, based on the popularity and market share, Apple is still the leader in these industries. However, Apple started to listen customers’ opinions. At first, Apple created a closed circle for iPhone and iPad in which the designers decide functions of the devices. Now, in their update of devices and operate system, they start to improve functions based on what customers’ want, which is one advantage of its competitiors, the Andiord system.

At last, in my opinion, in the marketing industry area, companies need to think about how much they should listen to their customers base on the companies’ situation, their product and the industry they are involved in.