Quote:
Originally Posted by AMC
After rambling through this thread I think the selling maxim
“Never ask the customer what he would like” comes to mind….
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After decades working in publishing, I know that is not true. At a recent meeting, my employer reiterated to a newly hired person that (I'm paraphrasing): "You should give the customer what he wants." That is based on finding out what he does what. Since we publish mostly fiction, we also need to know what our competitors are doing.
The arcane term "Market Research" involves exactly this. The same is true of industrial/product design. Manufacturers need to know what customers want. They can't guess. A person can publish whatever they want without doing market research but run the very real risk of printing/publishing something few will buy.