Market Research Discuss: "Market research is probably the greatest single deterrent to excellence in modern business. It's crutch for manager with no vision and no conviction."

One of the most famous corporate success stories of recent memory, the Apple Corporation, did almost no market research. Instead it relied upon the vision of its CEO and founder Steve Jobs. "Apple as a company follows its instincts. They're less interested in giving the market what it wants as they are in giving the market what it doesn't yet know it wants. Apple aims to create innovate products that didn't previously exist (iPad) or take existing products and redefine them in a way that makes them completely new (iPod, iPhone)" (Bradley 2010). Apple customers are loyal, yet it does not use focus groups, surveys, questionnaires, or other conventional methods of assessing what consumers want. Consumers do not know what they want, Jobs believed. The iPad was one of its hottest-selling items, despite the fact that many technology insiders and market gurus joked that they had no idea what it was supposed...

Ford, much like Jobs later did with the PC, strove to innovate on an existing product to address perceived deficits. Before Ford, cars were expensive and slow-moving 'vanity pieces' or novelties than useful vehicles. Through standardized production, Ford made cars affordable and also more reliable. He did not do market research to create such product innovations, however.
Ford and Jobs' principles suggest that market research can be useful in terms of understanding customer perceptions of current products -- customer may say they do not like a certain flavor of Pop Tart (cherry) and prefer another kind (brown sugar) and would like to see a new flavor (mint chocolate). But coming up with a new breakfast snack idea that suits consumer needs of the future needs requires another, overriding intelligence in the form of a creative designer. When companies simply respond to what customers say they want, the companies often…