The Brilliant Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs is arguably the best marketer to come along in the past 60 years, and perhaps even the last century.  Within the technology industry, he has no equals when it comes to giving the customer what he wants.

Jobs may have started out a brash, young inventor; his genius, though, lay not in applied technology, but in the marketing of it.  He lacked formal training, and had no interest in doing market research to learn what his customers wanted.  He went with his gut.  He had an intuitive, uncanny sense of what the customer wanted, and he was most often right.

Photo April 1, 1976: Steve Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak

Photo circa 1978: Steve Jobs and Apple co-founder Mike Markula

He retired on Wednesday as Apple’s CEO, but history will judge his legacy not as the executive of the American firm with the largest capitalization, but as the executive with the gift of anticipating the next great thing and serving it up to people in irresistible fashion.

Steve Jobs may not have created the term “buzz”, but under his leadership the term has become synonymous with Apple’s skill in introducing new products.  Jobs understands theater.  

Beginning with the iPhone, Jobs seized on the tactic of stimulating demand by holding back supply.  No one in consumer technology does it better.  Every technology executive I have talked with about Jobs secretly wishes for his or her company’s own “iPod moment”, yet none have been able to duplicate it.

This past January, after 20 years, I switched my desktop from Windows back to Mac.  I spent a good hour and a half in Apple’s Palo Alto store choosing the model, chatting with sales associates clad in the familiar royal blue tee-shirts, and making mental notes of “the experience”.  

It is part art, and part science.  Shaped by formula, yes, but sculpted by culture and attitude of the staff.  It is not something easily copied.

Two months later, a week after the release of the iPad 2, I revisited the store at 8:00 on a Saturday morning for one-on-one training.  I was truly surprised to see fifty people - several with lawn chairs and coolers - waiting in line for the store’s 10:00 opening.  A week after the launch!  When I left an hour later, there were more than 100 standing in the queue.

I have the greatest respect for Steve Jobs, and thank him for showing the world how a business can achieve enormous success when choosing to focus on delighting its customers.