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The Greatest Marketer this Generation has Ever Known

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There is a vast difference between an creator and a visionary. With explicit instructions, anyone can build or create something. By following the established rules and adhering to the status quo, you can create the intended product. However, a true visionary sees the things that the instruction manual fails to include. The visionary does not forget the original instructions, but rather sees the missing pieces and creates a far greater product that could ever have come from the intended product. Steve Jobs exemplified to the world the characteristics of a true visionary. During his time with us he challenged the way that advertisers marketed their products. In Jobs mind it was about more than a good campaign, it was a moral choice. If you advertised and sold and inferior product, it made you a liar. There was no room for a mediocre product.

Like an true successful person, Jobs made a few notable mistakes. And while every campaign did not reach runway success, Apple products often held their own in advertising. In the early 1980s, Jobs recognized the need for extraordinary marketing for his products. It was then that he teamed up with Chiat/Day, an ad agency in Los Angeles that is led by Jay Chiat and Lee Clow. With the partnership of Jobs, Chiat and Clow, Apple’s advertising campaigns quickly became the envy of the marketing industry.

Apple hit the marketing jackpot with its “1984” campaign. It went on to become the most popular commercial of all time. It was the ad that set the standard for all advertisements to come. It changed the marketing game once and for all. And although that advertisement still remains fresh in the minds of marketers today, Jobs advertisement tactics did not hit its full potential until the return from his decade-long absence in 1997.

After his return he launched the “Think Different” campaign with Chiat/Day. This campaign did not just advertise its product, but rather pushed consumers to change its mindset completely. Throughout the following years, Jobs would produce numerous campaigns that advertised both a product and a way of life. From iTunes to the iPod, from the iPhone to the iPad, Jobs had a way of innovating and living as a remarkable visionary from day to day.

Knowing that his time was close to ending, Jobs released his final product in March 2011: the iPad 2. In this last advertising campaign, Jobs sent out his career epitaph through the commercial’s copy. In the “We Believe” iPad 2 campaign, the commercial beautifully states, “This is what we believe. Technology alone is not enough. Faster. Thinner. Lighter. Those are all good things. But when technology gets out of the way, everything becomes more delightful, even magical. That’s when you leap forward. That’s when you end up with something like this.”

With those words, Jobs summed up not only the newest product in the Apple line, but it exemplified everything that Jobs stood for as a marketer and product developer. His staunch moral belief in the inseparability of beauty and truth leaked into all of his work. “Something like this” was advertising you not only believed, but wanted to buy.

Beauty and truth. It was Steve Jobs’s gift to this world.

The Greatest Marketer this Generation has Ever Known by
Authored by: Harrison Barnes