Jack Ma Quotes

Differentiate your products, provide great service and don't even think about trying to compete with Wal-Mart on Price.

If you're competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.

Only a few businesses will succeed by having the lowest price, so most will need a strategy that includes customer services.

Southwest Airlines is successful because the company understands it's a customer service company. It also happens to be an airline.

I look at companies as price-players or quality-players. The only way to go with J.Crew was quality.

Our employees and competitors thought we were docile. We want to be defiantly disruptive. I don't mean necessarily by launching price wars but by being the best at the basics - having the best customer service, the best on-time performance, the best coffee - in a thoughtful, not a testosterone-laced, way.

The most essential thing for us was to get the business model right, then put the world-class technology under it to support it. At Merrill, that meant not doing what people expected.

In the past, the U.K. got away with selling things that weren't unusual. Now it's no use trying to export without having something that's unusual and better.

What you can do is ask: 'What is the value to the customer? What are they willing to pay for?' Then, deliver great products and services.

I don't think my basic business strategy is well known by the public, probably because people think it's too simple. My strategy has always been to try to focus in on a product or service where you can create a dollar of value for 20 cents and sell it for 40 cents.

If Nintendo asks consumers to pay more money than the other platforms, then it's Nintendo's mission to provide the added value for which the people are willing to pay. In order to do that, we must remain unique and cannot be reproduced somewhere else.

I never think in terms of how we can compete against the other companies; rather, our primary focus is to make consumers feel the uniqueness and attractiveness of our products.

The only real way to differentiate yourself from the competition is through service.

When the functionality of a product or service overshoots what customers can use, it changes the way companies have to compete. When the product isn't yet good enough, the way you compete is by making better products. In order to make better products, the architecture of the product has to be interdependent and proprietary in character.

Every day were saying, 'How can we keep this customer happy?' How can we get ahead in innovation by doing this, because if we don't, somebody else will.

Customer service will become the primary value added function of every business.

There are lots of things about Amazon for which they deserve credit. They're innovative. There are lots of very, very happy Amazon customers. I'm not here to dispute that Amazon has been personally good for me or to say that they haven't been, so far, good to their customers.

A company's best advantage should be a quality product offered at the right price. That fair competition is what drives innovation.

I am concerned about any attrition in customer traffic at Starbucks, but I don't want to use the economy, commodity prices or consumer confidence as an excuse. We must maintain a value proposition to our customers as well as differentiate the Starbucks Experience. That is the key.

It's widely assumed that you can't compete with free, and that seems like a reasonable thing to think. But this has not been my experience.

One of Netscape's main attractions to customers from Day One is that we provide alternatives. And that's cherished by many customers - certainly not all.

When looking at trends I always ask myself basic and timeless questions about business, and the one I seem to always come back to is, 'How is this different than anything else in the marketplace?'

I think if companies start reinventing themselves and focus on the customer experience more, they will win out in the end.

That doesn't mean you have to have the lowest costs in the industry to succeed. But you need to make sure the activities and product attributes that increase your costs above the other guy bring in at least that much more in revenue, and hopefully more.

It's easier to build a business around a first-class product, even if it's a more expensive product to produce.