Personal inspiration
When I need personal inspiration, for years I have played the Apple "Think Different" ad. I even bought crazyones.co.za, although still don't know what I am going to do with it.
Jobs could easily have starred in his own ad - because he was certainly one of the crazy ones who have changed the world.
Master marketer
Jobs was a master marketer. He understood that the brand is built by the customers' experience and by what they tell their friends. He also understood how to look at the world and totally disregard the status quo and reinvent it afresh.
When he returned to the company he founded after a decade in the wilderness, he saved it not by launching a new technology but by making his computers beautiful and colourful - and when people saw blue and pink computers, they told their friends.
Care, passion and love
Apple builds devices with care and passion and, dare I say, love; even the parts of the machines, which the customer didn't see and others would have left because no one would have noticed, have always been a focus of meticulous attention to detail and beautiful design.
Jobs built his devices for himself; he knew that, because he was pushing boundaries, no consumer focus group would ever be able to imagine what they wanted, and he backed himself and his company to launch products in markets where others feared to tread, such as the tablet market that was reinvented with the iPad, the music industry which he completely reinvented (think iPods and iTunes) and other industries beside.
Impactful and brave advertising
He produced fabulous, impactful and brave advertising.
But his marketing genius was to build stuff and experiences that people love, and to create a comfortable ecosystem accessed by devices that are themselves pieces of art - objects of desire - and then to understand that those objects and devices are only tools - it's what they release, in and for the individual, that's the "killer app".
My tribute to the marketing genius of Steve Jobs is that my life is surrounded by Apple, by iPods, iPhones, iPads and Macbooks - they make my life better and I constantly tell my friends so.
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