Consumer Needs Quotes & Sayings

In order to sell a product or a service, a company must establish a relationship with the consumer. It must build trust and rapport. It must understand the customer's needs, and it must provide a product that delivers the promised benefits. — Jay Conrad Levinson

Cigarette companies market heavily to young people. They need young customers because their product kills the older ones. It is the only product that, if used as intended, kills the consumer. — George Carlin

What constitutes wise policy . . . will depend on whether the immediate objective of policy is the promotion of political ends, the protection of vested interests, or the satisfaction of consumer needs. — George W. Stocking

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay. — Kathleen Norris

McMansions in sprawling suburbs, without mountains of unnecessary packaging, without giant mechanized monofarms, without energy-hogging big-box stores, without electronic billboards, without endless piles of throwaway junk, without the overconsumption of consumer goods no one really needs is not an impoverished world. I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life. — Charles Eisenstein

People need things. I don't live a monk's existence, I'm a consumer, but I try to do it to the level that doesn't feel like there's an overabundance of something. — Jamie Lee Curtis

Consumer society tantalises us. We then try within ourselves to control the needs that are being constantly stimulated. — Susie Orbach

The entire world economy rests on the consumer;
if he ever stops spending money he doesn't have
on things he doesn't need
we're done for. — Bill Bonner

Today's consumer is less interested in possessing things and more in experiencing them. That's something the music industry needs to get its head around. Do we even need record companies any more? — Jimmy Chamberlin

We need to deal with three things that are important: first, we need a very deep reconsideration of how we are dealing with the economy. Second, there must be a very deep reconsideration of our way of life. We cannot simply adopt American-style consumer culture. To Islamize that is to de-Islamize Islam.Thirdly, it is important for us to understand the economy and the environment are common challenges for everyone. This is where the singularity of Islamic principles needs to join the universal values that we share with others. — Tariq Ramadan

The key to growing a business is that you need to be meeting some segment of the consumer's needs. If you've got a small business and a product or service that is not popular, you simply have to change your product or service to be more popular. — Ben Cohen

The money economy thus leaves a large ecological footprint, defined as the amount of land and resources required to meet a typical consumer's needs. For example, with only about 4% of the world's population, the United States, the largest money economy, consumes in excess of one-quarter of the world's energy and materials and generates in excess of 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. — Stuart L. Hart

We typically misunderstand what's wrong about consumerism. It's not that it makes us love material things too much. To be a good consumer, you have to desire to get lots of things, but you must not love any of them too much once you have them. Consumerism needs children who do not stay attached to their toys for very long and learn to expect the next round of presents as soon as possible. When consumerism succeeds, our attachments are shallow, easily broken, so we can move on to the next thing we're supposed to get. Being a good consumer means desiring new things, not cherishing old ones. And the new things you're supposed to desire are not always material things. Spirituality is now a consumerist enterprise, too. — Phillip Cary

It seems that every generation needs its public, tweedy, literary personality to sell its consumer electronics. To whatever degree I can live up to the Plimptonian legacy, I am humble and proud. — John Hodgman

Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit - that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back - then we "cut our loses" and drop the relationship. This has also been called "commodification," a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of "covenant" is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage. — Timothy Keller

The problem with thinking "we go to church" is that it gives us a consumer mindset: I'm looking for a church that meets my needs. I need a good church that will help me. — Craig Groeschel

China is a main energy consumer and, therefore, is also a big greenhouse gas emitter. We must use energy resources rationally and must conserve. This needs us to adjust our economic structure, transform the mode of development, to make economic development more dependent on progress of science and technology and the quality of the work force. — Wen Jiabao

Every man is a consumer, and ought to be a producer. He is by constitution expensive, and needs to be rich. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The worldwide financial and economic crisis seems to highlight their distortions and above all the gravely deficient human perspective, which reduces man to one of his needs alone, namely, consumption. Worse yet, human beings themselves are nowadays considered as consumer goods which can be used and thrown away. — Pope Francis

Legislators need to support privacy to establish consumer confidence. — Marc Rotenberg

The intensive use of photographs by mass media lays ever fresh responsibilities upon the photographer. We have to acknowledge the existence of a chasm between the economic needs of our consumer society and the requirements of those who bear witness to this epoch. This affects us all, particularly the younger generations of photographers. We must take greater care than ever not to allow ourselves to be separated from the real world and from humanity. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Foremost is the principle that the purpose of consumer research is to understand the customer's needs and wishes, and thus design product and service that will provide better living for him in the future. A second principle is that no one can guess the future loss of business from a dissatisfied customer. — W. Edwards Deming

Whereas during the primitive stage of capitalist accumulation "political economy considers the proletarian only as a worker," who only needs to be allotted the indispensable minimum for maintaining his labor power, and never considers him "in his leisure and humanity," this ruling-class perspective is revised as soon as commodity abundance reaches a level that requires an additional collaboration from him. Once his workday is over, the worker is suddenly redeemed from the total contempt toward him that is so clearly implied by every aspect of the organization and surveillance of production, and finds himself seemingly treated like a grownup, with a great show of politeness, in his new role as a consumer. — Guy Debord

(On producer/consumer relationship in subsistence farming) This is the sort of interconnectedness that once defined every outpost across our emerging nation. But outposts grew into towns, towns grew into cities, and cities grew into metropolises, necessitating a push into resource bases far beyond these population centers. Even as this occurred, the conveniences of modern life--electricity, indoor plumbing, the automobile--took hold, further eroding any sense of shared responsibility for the community's survival. From the standpoint of our most basic needs, we became islands unto ourselves, despite the ever-increasing population density. — Ben Hewitt

On the mathematical side, you could in principle build a society in which people were fulfilling their needs and flourishing as human beings in a higher way than in a consumer society, provided you had the right investments in the opportunity to flourish in less materialistic ways. — Tim Jackson

Caterham realises corporate America and the American consumer market ... is the largest consumer market in the world and it is something that needs to be part of Formula One. — Alexander Rossi

In the consumer culture of marriage, commitments last as long as the other person is meeting our needs. We still believe in commitment, because we know that committed relationships are good for us, but powerful voices coming from inside and outside tell us that we are suckers if we settle for less than we think we need and deserve in our marriage. Most baby boomers and their offspring carry in our heads the internalized voice of the consumer culture-to encourage us to stop working so hard or to get out of a marriage that is not meeting our current emotional needs. — William J Doherty

But this doesn't mean that there is incompatibility between regulation and rapid innovation: it is more of a disconnect, since both sides are there to serve customers' needs and it is those customers, both corporate and consumer, who will make the choice. These — Susanne Chishti

You're pregnant? Congratulations, the world needs another mindless, semiliterate consumer. — Dov Davidoff

To join the makers of the world is always to feel at least a little more self reliant, a little more omnicompetent. For everyone to bake his own bread or brew his own beer is, we're told, inefficient, and by the usual measures it probably is ... But though it is certainly cheaper and easier to rely on untold, unseen others to provide for our everyday needs, to live that way comes at a price, not least to our sense of competence and independence. We prize these virtues, and yet they have absolutely nothing to do with the efficiencies of modern consumer capitalism. Except perhaps to suggest that there might be some problems with modern consumer capitalism. — Michael Pollan

It is a pure tautology to say that crises are provoked by a lack of effective demand or effective consumption. The capitalist system does not recognize any forms of consumer other than those who can pay, if we exclude the consumption of paupers and swindlers. The fact that commodities are unsaleable means no more than that no effective buyers have been found for them, i.e. no consumers (no matter whether the commodities are ultimately sold to meet the needs of productive or individual consumption). — Karl Marx

Just as the Japanese pioneered a new form of manufacturing - lean production and quite new standards of reliability - so Tata, too, is embracing new forms of manufacture in order to revolutionise the price to meet the consumer needs of a poor, developing country. — Martin Jacques

Society has become well versed in the methods necessary to weaken the radicalism of the Gospel by reducing Christianity to what is viewed as reasonable by the logic of the market and by a culture committed to a largely post-Christian, consumerist vision of human life. Thus the disruptive character of Christianity is silenced and Christian spirituality is repackaged as a soothing therapeutic exercise that serves the needs of a culture committed above all else to the enjoyment of consumer activities. — Matthew T Eggemeier

The Ideal Consumer is someone who is constantly dissatisfies, constanly needs more and more products in order to feel better. — Jean Kilbourne

Today, according to the New York Times, each person is exposed to thirty-five hundred desire-inducing advertisements every day. Rodney Clapp wrote, "The consumer is schooled in insatiability. He or she is never to be satisfied - at least not for long. The consumer is tutored that people basically consist of unmet needs that can be appeased by commodified goods and experiences. — Skye Jethani

The ever-mounting glut of waste materials is characteristic by-product of modern consumer society. It might even be argued that capitalism's continual need to find of generate markets means that disposibility and waste have become the spine of the system. To consume means, literally, to destroy or expend, and in the garbage crisis we confront the underlying truth of a society in which enormous productive capacities and market forces have harnessed human needs and desires, without regard to the long or even short-term future of life on the planet. — Stuart Ewen

Production goes up and up because high pressure advertising and salesmanship constantly create new needs that must be satisfied: this is Admass- a consumer's race with donkeys chasing an electric carrot. — J.B. Priestley

Ideally, nothing should be embraced by a consumer firmly, nothing should command a commitment till death do us part, no needs should be seen as fully satisfied, no desires considered ultimate. There ought to be a proviso 'until further notice' attached to any oath of loyalty and any commitment. It is but the volatility, the in-built temporality of all engagements that truly counts; it counts more than the commitment itself, which is anyway not allowed to outlast the time necessary for consuming the object of desire (or, rather, the time sufficient for the desirability of that object to wane). — Zygmunt Bauman

One of many challenges is of course to create a legal basis for copyright issues that's up to date with both modern distribution, consumer behavior and the rights and needs of creators and copyright holders. — Lisa Langseth

Excess consumption doesn't make people happy. We can continue to provide for our needs, but we can't continue the endless pursuit of ever more consumer goods. There is no energy source that can provide enough consumer goods to meet our human and emotional needs; there never has been, and that's why it's been such a fruitless pursuit. — Tim DeChristopher

If Adam and Eve were not hunter-gatherers, then they were certainly gatherers. But, then, consumer desire, or self-embitterment, or the 'itch,' as Schopenhauer called it, appeared in the shape of the serpent. This capitalistic monster awakens in Adam and Eve the possibility that things could be better. Instantly, they are cast out of the garden and condemned to a life of toil, drudgery, and pain. Wants supplanted needs, and things have been going downhill ever since. — Tom Hodgkinson

I think we have a great track record on being relevant, on identifying consumer trends, needs and wants. — Jim Cantalupo