Haven’t graduated from college and can’t write a single line of code, what secret helped Steve Jobs create a trillion-dollar Apple technology empire?

Apple’s founder Steve Jobs is considered one of the most successful people in business history when turning a near-bankrupt company into the second most profitable company in the world. The irony is that Steve Jobs is not good at exams as well as engineering.

In fact, Steve Jobs himself was not a computer engineer, could not write a single line of code or even have an MBA. Ironically, he didn’t even have a college degree and, according to many employees, his management skills were terrible. If Apple operated in a state administrative or rigid management style, there would certainly be no place for Steve Jobs.

So what makes this Apple founder so great? The simple answer is marketing talent. So what is Steve Jobs’ secret in marketing?

Image source: Tier10

Find friends who are better than me

Steve Jobs himself was a talented person, but what made him so successful was his ability to find and make friends with people who were better than him. One of Steve’s first friends and teachers was Regis McKenna, a marketing legend from Silicon Valley. It was McKenna who reached out to Mike Markkula to get him into Apple when it was a small business based in a garage. Markkula himself created the marketing backbone for Apple and the company still uses it for 42 years to this day.

Later, Steve also befriended advertising expert Lee Clow, who created the famous “Think Defferent” marketing campaign in 1984.

The lesson here is that no matter how good you are, how much potential you have, you should still learn to network, listen to people who are better than you and always look for experts who know more than you to learn.

The product must be really good

Guy Kawasaki, who worked under Steve at Apple, said the founder was different from other marketing geniuses in that he had to make a really good product first. Nowadays many marketing professionals think that no matter how good or bad a product is, the marketer must still advertise it, but Steve is different. He always wants to strictly control from product quality to marketing, not simply “take any trash and paint it with lipstick”.

Image source: Wikipedia

Core values

When Apple was founded in 1977, Steve Jobs and Markkula listed three core values ​​of the company:

1. Apple always accompanies customers

2. Apple only focuses on doing well in some areas, not rambling

3. Apple will transform all of its core values ​​such as simplicity, high quality… into all activities, not only in product production but also in packaging, display or even media style.

Steve Jobs himself became great because he persisted in applying immutable core values ​​to every aspect of Apple. You think it’s that simple? Take a look at your company’s website to see if the sections are unified as if they were made of one unchanging core value or if they were a combination of many different things. Do you find your website looks like it was created by one person or is it a combination of many different styles and then combined into a mess.

Even if your website has a uniform design, is it suitable for the media style, press conference of the business? What about packaging, product display and delivery? Does everything agree with the original core values ​​of the business or is it only half-heartedly followed.

Dare to “burn” money

Steve is a man who knows how to perform in front of a crowd and dares to spend money on what he thinks is reasonable. A good example is the 1984 advertisement for the Macintosh computer. As usual, Steve Jobs wanted a big advertisement for this product. He hired the famous director Ridley Scott at the time for $ 900,000 to make a 60-second commercial, then spent an additional $ 800,000 to be able to run this video at the Super Bowl. The total value of $1.7 million at that time was equivalent to $3.4 million today if inflation is taken into account and that is obviously a huge number for a 60-second clip.

This bold decision by Steve is fraught with risk when it is still unclear whether the Macintosh will sell. Even Apple executives didn’t like the ads at all and they planned to not make them, but Steve rejected them all, accepted to play big and got a response. Apple’s reputation became better, more people knew, and Apple’s image value was worth more than the revenue that the Macintosh brought in.

Products need a story

During the 1984 promotional event, Apple promoted the program as a marketing event whose idea and originality made many people remember as an unforgettable experience. After the 1984 campaign, Steve followed suit, spending $2.5 million on the entire 40-page Newsweek ad. Then came the “Think Different” or “I’m a Mac” campaigns.

The common point of all of the above steps is to create an experience for customers, creating compelling stories that Apple lovers have to wait in long lines to buy products like waiting to buy tickets to see famous singers perform.

Former Apple executive Jean Louis Gassee said Steve understands the importance of creating stories in marketing campaigns and uses them continuously.

“People want interesting stories. That’s why today there’s a lot of criticism directed at Apple and current CEO Tim Cook because they don’t have any interesting stories,” Mr. Gassee said.

*Source: Business2Community