Science Quote by W. Edwards Deming

Deming’s line reads like a plain business aphorism, but it’s really a quiet indictment of the quarterly-profit religion. He doesn’t locate “profit” in clever pricing, aggressive sales tactics, or cost-cutting theater. He puts it in loyalty, advocacy, and social proof: the customer who returns, talks, and recruits. That’s not sentimentality; it’s a systems claim. If people keep coming back, your processes are stable. If they brag about you, your quality is consistent enough to survive scrutiny. If they bring friends, your value travels without paid persuasion.

The subtext is classic Deming: profit is an outcome, not a target. Chasing profit directly often produces the opposite behavior - shortcuts, corner-cutting, and internal incentives that make the spreadsheet look good while the product quietly rots. Repeat customers are the audit your organization can’t fake. You can buy attention once; you can’t reliably buy genuine recommendation at scale without earning it.

Context matters. Deming became synonymous with postwar quality management, especially as Japanese manufacturers outperformed American firms that were still treating defects and customer frustration as the cost of doing business. His larger critique was managerial: most failures are not worker failures, they’re system failures designed by leadership. This quote compresses that worldview into a consumer-facing metric. It tells executives, in effect, to stop confusing extraction with growth. The only durable margin is trust, built by process discipline, not persuasion.