If you've spent any time in digital marketing or in the advertising industry, I can almost guarantee that you've had to listen to a smug creative director justifying his disdain for user research with the famous Henry Ford quote, "If I had asked the customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse." There's a little problem with the quote. Like many things that smug creative directors say, it's utter 🐂💩. There's not a shred of evidence that Henry Ford ever said it.

It also seems like the kind of quote that was invented by someone who never spent any time around actual horses. If you have experience with horses (or their owners), it's pretty easy to come up with a list of better ways to improve a horse's fitness for daily transportation than speed. Off the top of my head, here are a few:

1. A horse I don't have to clean up after
2. A horse I don't have to feed when it isn't working
3. A horse that doesn't get sick
4. A horse that doesn't have an odor
5. A horse that can pull more weight

You might guess (correctly) that early automobile advertising would provide a clue to what late 19th century consumers wanted from their horseless carriages. The Winton Motor Carriage Company ran the first automobile ad in the March 1898 issue of Scientific American. The ad leads off with a promise that captures the first three items from my list: "Dispense with a horse and save the expense, care and anxiety of keeping it." The ad closes with #4 from my list. Not mentioned in the ad was that the top speed of the 1898 Winton was 20 mph, a good bit slower than a galloping horse.

Here's the ad below:

On top of that, we have evidence that Henry Ford's point of view on understanding the customer was exactly the opposite of the quote. In How to Win Friends and Influence People, published while Henry Ford was still alive, Dale Carnegie quotes Ford as saying, "If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person's point of view and see things from that person's angle as well as from your own."

If you want to sell more, listen to how customers describe their problems. Then build that, and describe your product in the same terms the customer used to describe their problem.

HT to Adrian Howard for reminding me of Carnegie's quote of Ford.

‍