The Marketing Bureau

Consumer. The tenth in a series of collections of useable quotations to make you look really smart in your next presentation or report.

"The deeper problems connected with advertising come less from the unscrupulousness of our 'deceivers' than from our pleasure in being deceived, less from the desire to seduce than from the desire to be seduced."

Daniel J. Boorstin, U.S. historian, quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.

 

"If you can't turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn't be in the ad writing business at all."

Leo Burnett, quoted in 100 LEO's, Chicago, IL: Leo Burnett Company, p. 19.

 

"Being myself animated by feelings of affection toward my fellowmen, I am saddened by the modern system of advertising. Whatever evidence it offers of enterprise, ingenuity, impudence, and resource in certain individuals, it proves to my mind the wide prevalence of that form of mental degradation which is called gullibility."

Joseph Conrad

 

"A man who is hungry need never be told of his need for food. If he is inspired by his appetite, he is immune to the influence of Messrs. Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn. The latter are effective only with those who are so far removed from physical want that they do not already know what they want."

John Kenneth Galbraith (1958), economics professor, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 84.

 

"Advertising is found in societies which have passed the point of satisfying the basic animal needs."

Marion Harper, Jr. (1960), president of McCann-Erickson, quoted in James B. Simpson, Contemporary Quotations, 1964, Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, p. 84.

 

"The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf."

Marshall McLuhan, Canadian communications theorist, quoted in Rhodas Thomas Tripp, The International Thesaurus of Quotations, 1970, New York, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, p. 18.

 

"The consumer isn't a moron. She is your wife."

David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man, 1971, New York: Ballantine, p. 84.

 

"The novice at advertising frequently gives the public credit for too much intelligence."

Printers' Ink, September 2 (1903), quoted in Eric Clark, The Want Makers: Inside the World of Advertising, 1988, New York: Penguin Books, p. 163.

 

"[D]ifferent groups are differentially vulnerable to advertising; and their vulnerability varies not so much with the character or quantity of advertisements as with the informational resources they can claim by age, education, station in life, and government guarantees of consumer protection."

Michael Schudson, Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion: Its Dubious Impact on American Society, 1984, New York: Basic Books, p. xvi.

 

“A consumer doesn't take anything away: he doesn't actually consume anything. Giving the same thing to a thousand consumers is not really any more expensive than giving it to just one”
Linus Torvalds

“A consumer is a shopper who is sore about something”
Harold Coffin

“A worker's paradise is a consumer's hell”.
Esther Dyson

“Advertising generally works to reinforce consumer trends rather than to initiate them”.
Michael Schudson

“All the action, in semiconductors at the present time is in the new consumer applications, and that's where we have focused our activities since we started doing our own products in the late '90s”.
David Milne

“Ambient Devices develops a new generation of consumer electronic products”.
David Rose

“America must be the teacher of democracy, not the advertiser of the consumer society. It is unrealistic for the rest of the world to reach the American living standard”.
Mikhail Gorbachev

“And the consumer doesn't care. They don't watch networks, they watch TV shows”.
Dick Wolf

“And what we did with this new company in 1985 is we did start focusing on PCs instead of video game machines, because we learned the hard lesson about bringing a product to market in a consumer world where it's very expensive to build a brand and get distribution and so forth”.
Steve Case

“As part of my efforts to fight identity theft, I worked with my colleagues on the Financial Services Committee to strengthen consumer protection with a reasonable notification requirement”.
Melissa Bean

“At the bottom, the elimination of spyware and the preservation of privacy for the consumer are critical goals if the Internet is to remain safe and reliable and credible”.
Cliff Stearns

“Batter strikeouts continue to go up like the Consumer Price Index”.
Leonard Robert Davids

“Before long it will be the animals who do the dieting so that the ultimate consumer does not have to”.
Mimi Sheraton

“Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes”.
Dave Barry

“But I think technology advertising will have to stop addressing how products are made and concentrate more on what a product will do for the consumer”.
Jay Chiat

“But, when we started our product portfolio, we focused the mixed signal requirements first for image processing devices and then in audio applications , targeting our technology

into the growing use of digital technology in consumer markets”.
David Milne

“Can advertising foist an inferior product on the consumer? Bitter experience has taught me that it cannot. On those rare occasions when I have advertised products which consumer tests have found inferior to other products in the same field, the results have been disastrous”.
David Ogilvy

“China also has moved away from its original status of purely producing basic, what you call, consumer commodities and Chinese companies are moving beyond China to various parts of the world”.
Sellapan Ramanathan

“Clearly, Japan is a most important market for digital consumer products”.
David Milne

“Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress”.
Herbert Hoover