They don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.
Verified
designSource: The Marketing Imagination, Theodore Levitt, 1983 (quoting Leo McGinneva)
The attribution is correct and unusually well documented for a line of this kind. Theodore Levitt credited Leo McGinneva by name for this formulation in 'The Marketing Imagination' (1983), where it appears in his discussion of what customers actually buy; Levitt's own better-known paraphrase is 'people don't want a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.' So McGinneva is the originator and Levitt the transmitter — this corpus entry has it right, which is worth noting since the line is far more often credited to Levitt. Note the text uses a typographic apostrophe in 'don't'.