Great Job sir

I want to share few words about the my newfound respect for Steve Jobs . Not that I didn’t have an opinion of the Apple man, a more cognitive perception has started building up. It’s amazing how the track of brand affinity for products from Apple’s stable can be traced backwards and the charm runs in a loop where it’s hard to tell what breeds what. iPhone/iPod- Apple- Jobs this circle has cultivated a corporate cult, very rare in consumer durable market where price sensitivity eventually dethrones the design aesthetics. Apple has managed to duck the trend for long and very successfully. But did they manage to rule the roost with their technological advancement or were they sooper-smart to peddle us some expensive gadgets which we gleefully grabbed and waved. As some of the reports which sidetracked the one-dimensional paeans of Jobs telling people how we would have been bereft of some of the major technological breakthroughs have rightly pointed out, here was a man with the most precocious marketing sense. In fact, one of the things which worked in Jobs favor was his subdued technical faculties viz a viz his business acumen. Some of the anecdotes I read from Google and Kodak telling how the people who interacted with Jobs came out saying this man doesn’t understand what is technically unachievable. Fordish in some measures, we may say, but that blithe disregard for conceivable boundaries is what has made Steve arguably the best CEO ever.

Right from the instance he thought Woznaick’s creation has economical viability to his second coming act, Jobs has displayed a keen understanding of consumer sensibilities and that spirit gets manifested in Apple products and gets magnified in the cult . Now closely dissect a product like iPod which sent the market in an orgy. From the functional point of view it was not a disruptive technology, never. From the design perspective, Jobs had envisioned simpler interface and easy navigation. But that price premium it commanded never really rose up to the pericved value of extra features and functionalities it had. But assessment be damned, a large section of people felt, it did and that section kept on inflating.

Apple was not just a company with growth, it had glamour and both of it have remained in right proportion to let nobody in the cult turn atheist. Why, I am yet to meet a person who doesn’t turn soft to the display of an Apple (Tim cook may consider the idea of reserving Apple as a collective noun for all the iPads/iPods..). To me, Steve Jobs- the person- is the greatest marketing success of all times, a person who embodied the brand (this may turn to be Apple’s nemesis eventually if cult doesn’t warm up to the new god). Precisely, this is his greatest failure as well. May be I risked hazy crystalgazing yet the marketing mavericks Nike and Coke outgrew their promoters and their brand elements don’t really draw much from the people in the corner office but Apple the company had a looming shadow of Jobs all the time and with the body gone it could be dark days ahead. It’s an interesting debate whether people liked iPhone and hence they liked the company which comes up with such good looking products and next in spotlight was Jobs and that made him the magician we know or was it the other way round or the halo of a man in turtle neck with some sexy GUI was a function of reflexive variable. Try BlackBerry-RIM-Mike..Doesn’t ring a very obvious bell..Even the most ubiquitous windows-MS- Gates has a big yawn to it..

But the film of perceived divinity of the iCEO was too thin to have blinded Jobs. He came up with iPhone even before the crest of iPod had sniffed its valley bone and topped iPhone’s adolescence with iPad’s cradle. Brilliant implementation of new islands strategy. Credit must be given to Jobs for pulling off such a great marketing feet with remarkable consistency. Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison have an odd habit of taking digs at competitors(no wonder, they were best friends) in their stinging style and some of the overt references to Microsoft products being unimaginative and copycats were a shot in the arm for the Apple’s marketing anatomy. It not just brought out the product differentiation which an advertisement actually should, it also gave that rebel, ‘terrorist’ appeal to the cult. Guts ( and a bit of extra moolah) to go beyond the Windows to iMac and you ‘belong’ to that aesthetically provoked connoisseurs of desktop gallery where Jobs was Arvinda Adiga and Gates became Chetan Bhagat.

Single recurring theme of Apple products has been of convergence. What IT has given to us in the most unjargonistic term is the power to communicate and compute. Manifestation of technological advancement remained varied and grew uni-dimensionally in their respective product category with enhanced performance and availability. Economic commentators classified streams of need along entertainment, communication, business and crossed it mongrel monikers of infotainment, etc etc, but at the core of it, you had concept of digitization which essentially meant you can bring it all together in a single box . Apple successfully marketed the marriage of entertainment and productivity applications on the prototype of a music player, phone and tablet and worked out it ergonomics well, really well…in a way people really didn’t mind even if I cost a fortune.

Make no mistake, these products existed much before got frutified literally and they had almost similar design but it took the packaging and presentation of a marketing genius to make them the hot cake. Right from the graphics of first Apple computer to iPad, tsunami of each Apple’s product launch brings a splash of many ‘we did similar thing long back’ footnote. Does that really matter? We are not in the business of awarding Noble prize. For me each new i is a turnaround story and each new entrant fit perfectly in the leitmotif of convergence. Fable of Steve Jobs (and by extension all that he stood up and brandished, the i factory) would be and should be the new testament of marketing bible. He doesn’t stand a chance of finding a passing mention in the IEEE journal and that makes his achievement even more remarkable, iThink..