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Category Archives: Insights for Manufacturers

5 Marketing Tips Manufacturers Can Take from Steve Jobs

by MGB2B

Whether you loved him or loathed him, Steve Jobs knew a whole lot about marketing. He wasn’t a brilliant engineer. That was his buddy, Woz. But Jobs knew how to sell the brilliance. How to package it, how to market it, and how to stay ahead of the competition in ways that the CEO of any manufacturing company would envy.

After all, isn’t that what keeps you up at night? That burning question: How can I keep up with – and surpass – my competitors? As I’m reading the Steve Jobs biography, it’s easy to see that Jobs was a master at this. Sure, he had his failures. But his successes were far greater.

Here Are 5 Marketing Tips for Manufacturers That We Can Gather from Jobs’s Time as the Face of Apple:

1. Put Innovation Ahead of Money. While he was referring to his use of LSD when he said it, Steve Jobs famously declared, “It reinforced my sense of what was important — creating great things instead of making money.” It seems elemental, but in the hot pursuit of the almighty dollar, creativity often gets lost. Don’t lose sight of what ultimately drives business – creatively solving the problems of your customers.
2. Think Different. While this was a longstanding tagline for Apple products, it perfectly embodies the Jobs philosophy. You can read anywhere that he stole the idea of a Graphical User Interface (as opposed to green characters on a black screen) from Xerox. But that’s only half of the story. Jobs and his team thought differently than the folks at Xerox PARC. They took something that was designed for businesses and made it a seamless, friendly, intuitive experience for the consumer market. In doing so, Apple eventually attracted different kinds of businesses from what Xerox was pursuing. Design-focused companies like ad agencies and architecture firms were an easy match for the Mac’s simple yet graphically advanced platform.
3. Get Inside the Heads of Your Customers. Like the design of products, the design of your ad campaigns, web content, and any brand communications should be created with your consumer in mind. You want them to know your features. They just want to know what they’ll gain. But they also want to trust your brand. They want to feel like you know what their day has been like. Like you can offer them something to make it better or easier in some way. Jobs knew this. And almost every decision he made – whether for marketing or product development – was driven by it. Today, there’s an easy way to use your customers’ desires and needs to drive your decisions. A core user study. Smart engineers do them. Smart marketers do them. And smart CEOs live and breathe by their results.
4. Don’t Be Everything to Everyone. Apple is for dreamers. For creators. For people who want to make change. That’s how they positioned the brand in 1997. The legacy that Steve Jobs created stands true even today. And it applies to both products and advertising. Focus on what you’re best at instead of adding mediocrity into the mix. Keep your message on-point. Don’t sully it with unnecessary excess. Simplicity is the name of the game.
5. Know Your Enemies. And your friends. Apple’s relationship with Microsoft was on-and-off over the years. And even when Microsoft succeeded, Jobs knew what Apple’s reaction would be and how their products would be different. As mentioned earlier, he kept an eye on what Xerox was doing, and used what he learned from them to create the interfaces we now use every day. Don’t copy your competitors. But know and understand what they are doing, so you can rise above them.

Steve Jobs had many flaws, for sure. But his product development and marketing instincts have changed the way we live today. Manufacturing companies would benefit from any one of these tips. Take them all together, and you might just find inspiration to revolutionize your industry. That sounds a whole lot better than simply “increasing the bottom line.”