Four Marketing Lessons I Learnt from watching One Video of Steve Jobs

Ziyaad Parker
2 min readNov 8, 2020

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This is one of my favourite videos by far, regardless of whether we all like to wear shorts and present a brand new product in a shorts. There are some valuable lessons to learn from watching 5 minutes of this historical marketing video.

I will go over four of the lessons I learnt while watching the video.

Wikipedia

Lesson One: Marketing is about values

Steve Jobs highlights the importance of values and how it is significant to be very clear of what your company has to offer because of all the interruptions and disturbances in the competitive market. Your company needs to know exactly what is being offered.

Lesson Two: Convey feelings

When you present a new product never talk about the features or the user cases of the product, instead convey the feelings and if possible compare the product offering to an fruit, vegetable or animal. A good example is comparing your product to something that people can relate to. The word apple for example, people almost all the time and most people do understand that it is delicious and crunchy. Humans are more relatable to products that they have experienced or achieved in their daily lives.

The concentration should be on building a universe of feelings, sensations, experiences, values that a customer gets upon purchasing a product. Know your customers languages and speak in their terminology.

Lesson Three: Focus on a single message

The advertising has to communicate the core values of your company, who it is and what it is about. Potential customers would like to know where your company currently fits in this planet.

The marketing message has to be something people as aspire to be and want. Apple were attracting geniuses and leaders. A brilliant marketing message is engaging, something the customer has to remember, to the point that leads to the purchase.

Example One

In today’s highly competitive business world, every company needs our software to run their manufacturing more efficiently.

Example Two

We will reduce your running costs by half.

Lesson Four: Think differently

Think like Nike, in the presentation Steve Jobs kept comparing Apple to Nike and the amount of money invested into Apple is the same as the bigger brands such as Disney, Coke and Sony. Nike honours great athletes and they honour great athletics.

When you are buying a computer, you can do work, edit photo’s and videos but when you purchase an Apple MacBook Air you can use it to build your passion, change the world and make it a better place.

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