Truly Creative Marketing

We remember Steve Jobs as inventing the iPod.
And nowadays the name iPod has become the generic for the entire category.
But MP3 players were around years before Apple started making them.
Other companies like Samsung and Sanyo made them.
But they weren’t big sellers.
They were ugly and complicated.
And that was the Steve Jobs revolution.
He made the MP3 player beautiful and simple.
But he did something much more creative than that.
Sure Steve Jobs understood computers.
But more importantly, he understood people.
Everyone knows he was a creative genius.
But he was actually a marketing genius.
First he concentrated on making his iPod what no MP3 player was.
Simple and beautiful.
And it was a truly beautiful object.
It looked bare and smooth and minimalist.
And holding it felt like holding a small, perfect pebble.
It was clean and futuristic.
But the next step is what makes Steve Jobs a marketing genius.
He knew this was the coolest product around.
All the coolest people would want to have one.
And to be seen with one.
But Jobs identified a problem that research never would have.
Although the coolest people will have them, they’ll be in their pockets.
So no one else will see them.
So no one else will know it’s an iPod.
All they’ll see is a pair of headphone leads that could belong to any MP3 player.
Then Jobs had a flash of intuition that no amount of research could have provided.
Jobs decided to reposition the entire competition.
The one thing absolutely every set of headphones had in common was their leads.
They were all interchangeable.
They were all black.
Steve Jobs did what no one else would have dreamed of doing.
He decided to do the exact opposite to the entire market.
The iPod would have white headphone leads.
So that, even if you couldn’t see the iPod in someone’s pocket, you couldn’t fail to see the leads.
And you’d know the really cool people had white leads.
And an iPod in their pocket.
Every person wearing white headphone leads became an advertisement for iPods.
Being different, standing out, doing the opposite of everyone else.
This became the Apple brand under Steve Jobs.
Apparently people were even getting mugged because muggers could tell they had iPods.
By their white headphone leads.
So, if you didn’t want to get mugged for your iPod, you should use black headphone leads.
Thus repositioning every other MP3 player as not worth a mugger’s time to mug you for.
And the white leads became the main feature of the advertising.
The posters featured a black silhouette of someone dancing to music over their headphones, with the white lead standing out.
They didn’t even need to show the iPod.
They could just hint at it.
Which of course made it even cooler.
It takes a lot of nerve to be minimalist.
To leave things out.
To go against the conventional wisdom of the entire market.
But that’s how Steve Jobs built the most valuable company in the world.
Under him everything was radical and minimalist.
The technology, the product, the design.
And especially the marketing.