100 Top-Notch Quotes about Sales & Marketing

"What is the difference between unethical and ethical advertising ?
Unethical advertising uses falsehoods to deceive the public; ethical advertising uses truth to deceive the public."

Vilhjalmur Stefansson (November 3, 1879 – August 26, 1962) was a Canadian Arctic explorer and ethnologist.


"Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it."

Stephen Butler Leacock (30 December 1869 – 28 March 1944) was a Canadian economist, writer and humorist.


"Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless."

Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.


"You can tell the ideas of a nation by its advertisements."

George Norman Douglas (December 8, 1868 - February 7, 1952) was a British writer.


"Many of small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising."

Mark Twain (born:Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (November 30,1835 – April 21, 1910) was an American author and humorist. Twain is noted for his novels Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which has been called "the Great American Novel", and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876). Twain was a friend to presidents, artists, industrialists, and European royalty.


"It never ceases to amaze me that companies spend millions to attract new customers (people they don't know) and spend next to nothing to keep the ones they've got ! Seems to me budgets should be reversed."

Thomas J. (born November 7, 1942) is an American writer on business management practices.


"The quality of services is going to be a selling point in a fickle environment where customers have more choices."

Rosabeth Moss Kanter (born 1943) is a tenured professor in business at Harvard Business School, where she holds the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professorship. In the 2007-2008 Academic school year, she taught a course to MBA students entitled Managing Change.


"Today's typical customer wants only two things:
1. Good feelings
2. Solutions to problems."

Michael LeBoeuf (-) is an American business author and former management professor at the University of New Orleans.


"If you are not thinking customer, you are not thinking."

Theodore Levitt (March 1, 1925 – June 28, 2006) was an American economist and professor at Harvard Business School. He was also editor of the Harvard Business Review and an editor who was especially noted for increasing the Review's circulation and for popularizing the term globalization. In 1983, he proposed a definition for corporate purpose: Rather than merely making money, it is to create and keep a customer.


"I buy when other people are selling."

Jean Paul Getty (December 15, 1892 – June 6, 1976) was an American industrialist who lived his last 24 years in the United Kingdom. He founded the Getty Oil Company, and in 1957 Fortune magazine named him the richest living American. At his death, he was worth more than $2 billion.