Why Steve Jobs Marketed Like a 5th Grader

Go-To-Market Shenanigans (#005)
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Today, we are going to discuss the following:

• Marketing 😳: The Simplicity of Selling (What made Apple, “Apple 🍎”)

• Advertising 🎥: No Words In Your Ad - Why It Works

• Product ⚙️: Brand Collaboration (Kith X Columbia)

• Links For The Week 🛜: Tunes & Go-To Reads

Marketing 📈
Could a 5th Grader Understand This?

Let's be honest: there are millions of products out there that we don’t need. But I sure as hell could find a way to convince myself that I need 1,000 songs in my pocket and more than 256 megabytes of storage.

Think about it this way. If you rolled into a party and showed your friends a new device you purchased and said, “It’s 256 MBs of Storage!” the convo would probably go like this:

You: *hands starting to sweat awkwardly holding an MP3 Player

Richie: “What’s 256 MBs of Storage?”

You: “It’s storing 256MBs of music?”

Richie: “Wait, how many songs can you fit on there?”

You: “Like 256 MBs worth of songs…”

Ok, well, maybe you’re smarter than the average Joe, or in this case, Richie, and you can calculate 256 MBs in your head, but let’s be honest, who even wants to go there with their thought process? Time is ever so fleeting, and we are now asking consumers to calculate a value for us; that kind of feels backward, doesn’t it?

Here’s the thing: communicating the end result is not easy. It takes a level of social interest in a topic, a deep understanding of the value proposition of your product, and the ability to forecast the conversation individuals will have about your product. If you are a product or business owner and have spent marketing dollars communicating your offering, I challenge you to pool a random number of your customers and ask them why they bought your product. More often than not, you find customers repeating back the verbiage you used to sell them on your product offering in the first place.

Communicate value. If your product offers numerical benefits, find a way to communicate the quantitative benefits with the qualitative description.

Steve Jobs said, “As companies, we need to be really clear about what we want people to know about us.”

Don’t get caught trying to sound smart. If you’re not careful, you might become a master of none.