Focus Groups Quotes

• 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.

  Steve Jobs

  Inspiring, Technology, Best Job

  "Steve Jobs: `There's Sanity Returning'". Bloomberg interview, www.bloomberg.com. May 25, 1998.

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• The most powerful people on earth are focus groups.

  William J. Clinton

  Powerful, People, Focus

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• Focus groups are a waste of time, filled with people telling you what you want to hear so they can go home.

  Sergio Zyman

  Home, People, Focus

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• Focus group research has created a composite No-Man who resembles no-one anyone has ever met.

  Cathy Lewis

  Men, Focus, Groups

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• Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group.

  Clayton Christensen

  Focus, Groups, Use

  Clayton Christensen (2015). “The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail”, p.206, Harvard Business Review Press

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• This party will not take its position based on public opinion polls. We will not take a stand based on focus groups. We will not take a stand based on phone-in shows or householder surveys or any other vagaries of pubic opinion.

  Stephen Harper

  Party, Phones, Focus

  Hansard (parlamentary debates transcript), January 29, 2003.

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• I don't have any focus groups on talent and programming. If I need five people in a mall to be paid $40 to tell me how to do my job, I shouldn't do my job.

  Roger Ailes

  Jobs, People, Focus

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• Steve Jobs always believed that you didn't want to do focus groups or research and ask people what they wanted. You wanted to create products that they didn't know they wanted yet and they would fall in love with. And I think that was part of the magic of his design philosophy.

  Steve Case

  Falling In Love, Jobs, Philosophy

  "What Does Future Hold for Tech World, Apple Without Jobs?". "PBS NewsHour" with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. October 6, 2011.

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• 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. As Henry Ford said many years earlier: "If I had listened to my customers, I would have built a faster horse." Inventions in general express Shannon entropy. They come from the supply side.

  George Gilder

  Horse, Years, People

  George Gilder (2013). “Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World”, p.32, Regnery Publishing

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• I need a focus group like I need a hole in my head.

  Suzy Becker

  Focus, Groups, Needs

  Source: bookpage.com

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• And the inner dynamics of Hollywood are like politics. Say you give a script to a group of executives - they all sit around, afraid to voice an opinion, saying nothing, waiting to know what the consensus is. Just like focus groups, opinion polls or a cabinet.

  Joe Eszterhas

  Voice, Giving, Waiting

  "The Hollywood hitman". Interview with Ed Vulliamy, www.theguardian.com. August 19, 2000.

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• What you hear in focus groups and conversations, people will give you 20 minutes of rage about how the borders are out of control. But then you start saying, practically, what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about the 11 million here? What are we going to do to get some workers we need for the farms? Then people start having a normal conversation.

  David Brooks

  People, Giving, Focus

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• What's the job of the candidate in this world? The job of the candidate is to raise the money to hire the consultants to do the focus groups to figure out the 30-second answers to be memorized by the candidate. This is stunningly dangerous.

  Newt Gingrich

  Jobs, Focus, Groups

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• They've seen me make decisions, they've seen me under trying times, they've seen me weep, they've seen me laugh, they've seen me hug. And they know who I am, and I believe they're comfortable with the fact that they know I'm not going to shift principles or shift positions based upon polls and focus groups.

  George W. Bush

  Believe, Who I Am, Laughing

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• I've never been in a focus-group meeting. I wonder how many anchors can say that.

  Shepard Smith

  Anchors, Focus, Groups

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• We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer.

  Jonathan Ive

  Jobs, Focus, Design

  "Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh". Interview with Mark Prigg, www.standard.co.uk. March 12, 2012.

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• If you have ever sat in a focus group in a swing state, you are 100% certain that most soft partisans make up their minds on who to vote for based on things that are totally outside of an understanding of issues.

  Christopher Michael Cillizza

  Swings, Issues, Focus

  "The Fix Live". The Washington Post Live Chat, live.washingtonpost.com. June 24, 2016.

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• Peter Hart, who's a pollster that's - who's done many focus groups about Hillary Clinton, talks about a glass curtain. She talks about the glass ceiling. He says voters feel there's a glass curtain between themselves and Hillary Clinton. They can't relate to her. They feel they don't really understand her, and that's made it easier for her opponents, of which there have been many over many years, to define her the way they want to.

  Tamara Keith

  Years, Glasses, Focus

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I did a comedy with Al Franken about his character Stuart Smalley, which was really about alcoholism and addiction and codependency. It had some painful stuff in it. When we showed it to focus groups, some of them actually said, "If I want to see a dysfunctional family, I'll stay home."

  Harold Ramis

  Home, Character, Addiction

  Source: www.ericspitznagel.com

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• ...The British press... [claimed that Tony] Blair was simply Bush's poodle - a favorite phrase, bewilderingly popular, although it made no sense - and that he was ignoring the will of the British people. Considering the hacks had spent Blair's first six years in office condemning him for relying on focus groups and opinion polls for his policies - in other words, paying attention to nothing but the will of the people, or at least their whims - that seemed a little rich to me, but as I said, logical consistency has never figured highly in the British media's scale of values.

  Larry King

  Media, Years, People

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• When you sit and watch the film with an audience, the focus groups and the cards and all of that is the less what you're worrying about. When you watch a film with an audience you see what is working and what's not working.

  Christopher McQuarrie

  Worry, Focus, Groups

  Source: www.denofgeek.com

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• I feel passionately about issues, and I don't hide my emotions from people. I am not a focus group-tested, blow-dried candidate or governor. Now that has always made some people, you know, uneasy. Some people like that style, some people don't. [...] But I am not a bully.

  Chris Christie

  Party, Blow, Issues

  News conference on George Washington Bridge scandal, www.washingtonpost.com. January 9, 2014.

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• I have always done what I love myself. My philosophy was that I never had focus groups. I did what I wear.

  Ralph Lauren

  Philosophy, Focus, Done

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• When you make comedy, you make it for the people and you try to have as many screenings and as many tests and you do focus groups and you read the cards and you try to give the people what they want in this comedy.

  Chris Rock

  People, Giving, Focus

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• We don't do focus groups - that is the job of the designer. It's unfair to ask people who don't have a sense of the opportunities of tomorrow from the context of today to design.

  Jonathan Ive

  Jobs, Philosophical, Opportunity

  "Sir Jonathan Ive: The iMan cometh". Evening Standard Interview, www.standard.co.uk. March 12, 2012.

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