A million words have been written and spoken since last week’s death of Apple founder Steve Jobs. But how could I not acknowledge the passing of this column’s idol, the greatest Marketeer of all?
More specifically, let’s take a look at what Jobs can teach you about your business. What did he get so right, so consistently?
Back when he started as a 21 year old in his family garage, he had marketing in mind.
Looking at the interest of geeky hobbyists for self-constructed kit computers, he could see a market for a real personal computer. He did the marketing, and brought his friend Steve Wozniak - a real electronic hacker - into a partnership to do the designing and programming. They built the Apple II.
Always Jobs insisted on simplicity of use. And a great deal of the Apple II’s success was achieved by tramping into the schools of America, and later the world, promoting it as an ideal educational tool. The kids could quickly get up and running without having to learn programming first.
There was another advantage to this marketing strategy: get them young and you’ll keep them for ever.
Then came the Macintosh, the computer that transformed how we all communicate. From Xerox he took the GUI graphic interface, from Stanford Research Institute, the mouse. All aimed at making computers simple, tactile to use, hiding the immense complexity within.
The fresh marketing drive aimed at the visual industry. Designers, advertising agencies, newspapers, architects - who also happened to be the opinion leaders in what is new and trendy.
Then came his decade in the wilderness. He could never see why everybody was not like him - driven, perfectionist, creative, demanding - which made him a terrible boss. In 1985 the board, made up of more conventional, button-down men, voted to effectively push him out.
Undaunted he formed a new computer company, NeXT. By 1997 Apple realised that they needed their dictator and bought NeXT. Jobs was back in the saddle.
Now began the greatest marketing tour de force we’ve ever seen. First came the iMac. Who would ever want a strange, coloured, transparent computer? Answer: everyone.
Jobs knew that marketing is about creating desire. He didn’t just get an engineer to design his products, he made the brilliant English artist Jonathan Ive his Senior Vice President of Industrial Design.
Ive conceived the off-the-planet iMac, and then the MacBook, iPod, iPhone and iPad. In other words, everything that makes an Apple an Apple.
Jobs understood image. Look at his advertising. An Apple commercial is unmistakably Apple. Smart, slick, clean, just like the products.
To market his iPods, Jobs created iTunes and before long became the kingpin of the music industry.
For the iPhone he created the Apps market - where other people did all the work.
His showmanship was legendary. All the secrecy behind new Apple products, right up to the moment when Jobs would stride onto a stage and unveil the new invention like a rabbit from a hat.
Also dazzling was his ability to generate waves of publicity for his products. Think of all the hype over the iPad. Five years before, Bill Gates had introduced his tablet computer as “the next great thing in computing.” He was right, but smart as he is, he just did not have the chutzpah that Jobs could bring to launching the product.
What were Jobs’ secrets? Brilliant concepts. Willingness to pay for the very best people and designers. A sense of timing. Persistence. And the one thing you may find difficult to learn: sheer genius.
Goodbye Steve, thanks for all the music.
ray@ebeatty.com
Blog: themarketeer-raybeatty.blogspot.com
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