It may sound absurd, but no matter how much they might think they do, consumers don’t know what they want. Indeed, Henry Ford once said: ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ Expressing a similar sentiment Steve Jobs once said: ‘Some people say, “Give the customers what they […]

It may sound absurd, but no matter how much they might think they do, consumers don’t know what they want. Indeed, Henry Ford once said: ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ Expressing a similar sentiment Steve Jobs once said: ‘Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do’. I was engaged by a multi-residential property developer to undertake research to determine what the target market for a project wanted in an apartment. Far and above anything else, the most common thing consumers in the majority of focus groups wanted was – ‘quality.’ In an apartment, members of the project’s target market wanted: Quality design. Quality fittings. Quality finishings. Quality features. While hardly astounding (who would not want quality) this desire for quality makes…