Marketing Genius
Sixty years ago, Henry Kaiser painted a slogan that’s been quoted in innumerable marketing texts on his fleet of cement trucks - “Find a need and fill it”. All us new product guys live by Henry’s creed. If it doesn’t fill a real need, it won’t last in the competitive arena of a retail store.
Some of us are better at finding an important unfilled need than others. Of all the new product guys on planet Earth, probably the best is Steve Jobs.
Consider the iPad.
For decades, computer marketers have considered most consumers as ignorant halfwits who find computers “too hard”, and thus won’t buy one or won’t learn to use one they’ve bought beyond email and web surfing for racy snaps of Anna Kournikova.
Blessed with an intuitive interface that anyone with fingers can operate, the iPhone blew through the smart phone market like Sherman marching through Georgia
The iPad implements the iPhone OS on a more powerful CPU and a larger touchscreen.
Out there in plain sight for all of us to see (but only Steve Jobs to recognize and exploit with a new product) was the fact that most consumers don’t want to figure out how to format a website, install a printer driver, upload files, jazz up presentations with animated slides, deal with spyware, or navigate arcane word processor menus.
Most consumers want to sell a house, read a newspaper, make a restaurant reservation, display a medical record, watch a movie, organize a party, pay a bill, see a video of the kids, send a message to a friend, and maybe sneak an occasional peek at Ms. Kournikova.
That the iPad does all of this with the simple, intuitive iPhone interface makes computer dinosaurs like Adobe and Microsoft whine (“no Flash graphics, no background processing”, etc.) and whimper in fear.
Lack of obscure features like background processing and Flash graphics won’t deter the up-to-now excluded majority of consumers from choosing a device that connects them to the entertaining and useful electronic nervous system of the planet - and is closer a toaster than a computer in operational complexity.
Bravo Steve!!
For a more sophisticated exposition of this idea, read Future Shock at:
Tags: labnotes, namelab, Naming, Strategic Branding
February 15th, 2010 at 6:12 pm
Jobs is also particularly adept at “stunting,” to use a football term, i.e. pretending to take a position then changing once the “ball” is snapped. I distinctly remember him stating that Microsoft’s “confluence” idea was a crock because “when people sit in front of a computer, they’re thinking; when they sit in front of a TV, they’re not.” He also pooh-poohed the idea of electronic books because “people don’t read anymore.”
So of course we now have iTunes, which has downloadable movies and TV shows, and with iPad, in addition to the other feature set, we have a powerful and superior alternative to Amazon’s Kindle.
Moral: Don’t listen to what Jobs says, watch what Jobs does…