I was taken out to the VP of Marketing’s brand new BMW and given a lecture on their craftsmanship and elegance. He then had me kneel down and look at the shimmer of the new paint. While we were kneeling down he said, “wouldn’t that blue look beautiful on our phone?”
Same Marketing VP, I was invited to his house to meet his cousin from England. Because he was European, he had a good sense of European style (I was told that too). I brought the three models of the final selection of color palette. A (BMW) blue, a silver, and a chocolate brown and warm silver version.
The VP was losing the battle on the BMW blue so I was there to be convinced by his cousin that the blue was best. His cousin liked the brown best. The clincher was his 8 year old daughter came up and said, “The blue looks dumb daddy, make it the brown”. The product was made brown.
Henry Ford was once asked about innovation, his risky venture, and the cars he made, and he said this: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said, ‘a faster horse’”.
In other words:
innovation must come from innovators; people don’t know what non-existent products they want until they see it and find themselves lusting for it.