"A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one"
About this Quote
The subtext is almost disciplinary: you can’t out-advertise a lousy experience for long. Ford is implicitly pushing back against the era’s emerging mass-consumer culture, where scale tempted manufacturers to treat customers as interchangeable units. His Model T revolutionized affordability, but it also raised expectations: if you’re going to sell to the many, you’re going to be judged by the many, repeatedly, in public.
Context sharpens the edge. Early 20th-century America was discovering what “mass market” really meant - national distribution, standardized parts, and word-of-mouth that traveled with workers and newspapers. In that environment, a “bad” product doesn’t just disappoint one buyer; it replicates its failure across thousands of identical units. Ford’s real claim is about compounding: quality compounds into loyalty and repeat purchases, while defects compound into reputational collapse. The market saturates with badness because people learn fast when you waste their money.
Quote Details
| Topic | Marketing |
|---|---|
| Source | Verified source: Moving Forward (Henry Ford, 1930)
Evidence: A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one. (Chapter II ("The Fear of Overproduction"); exact page not verifiable from available previews). The earliest PRIMARY-source attribution I could verify points to Henry Ford’s book "Moving Forward" (written in collaboration with Samuel Crowther). Multiple independent references attribute the quote to this work, and the full text appears in the Project Gutenberg Australia transcription of "Moving Forward" within Chapter II, titled "The Fear of Overproduction." However, I could not reliably extract/verify a specific printed page number because (1) Google Books preview did not expose searchable full text for this line, and (2) the Gutenberg Australia page intermittently blocks automated access in this environment. The book is variously listed as having a 1930 copyright/first edition (U.S., Doubleday, Doran) and a 1931 publication date in some catalogs/editions (e.g., UK and some library records). The best-supported 'first publication' date is 1930 (copyright/first ed.). Other candidates (1) Factory Man (James E. Harbour, James V. Higgins, 2009) compilation95.0% ... Henry Ford's dictum that “ A market is never saturated with a good product , but it is very quickly saturated wit... |
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Ford, Henry. (2026, February 11). A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-market-is-never-saturated-with-a-good-product-18378/
Chicago Style
Ford, Henry. "A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one." FixQuotes. February 11, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-market-is-never-saturated-with-a-good-product-18378/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"A market is never saturated with a good product, but it is very quickly saturated with a bad one." FixQuotes, 11 Feb. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/a-market-is-never-saturated-with-a-good-product-18378/. Accessed 24 Feb. 2026.






