Why do companies that have been very successful in the past with market changing determination now want to listen to the market for new success?
This quote is from an article written about the new “crowdsourcing” campaigns recently launched by Starbucks and Nokia. This is a theme I’ve been coming back to in my own reading and thinking. Some of the very best companies I know and respect really don’t care what their customer wants, they simply have a vision they are executing.
Apple, notoriously, never does focus groups to test new products. This doesn’t mean they don’t care about their customers, but Steve Jobs will be the first to point out that people were not clamoring for a new MP3 player when they launched the iPod, and that worked out pretty well for them.
