Steve Jobs explaining Apple brand & products innovation roadmap

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Steve Jobs explaining Apple brand & products innovation roadmap

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Transcript:

Good morning who we’re up til three o’clock last night finishing this advertising up and I want to show it to you in a minute see what you think of it I’ve I’ve been back about eight to ten weeks and we’ve been working really hard and what we’re trying to do is is not something really highfalutin we’re trying to get back to the basics we’re trying to get back to the basics of great products great marketing and great distribution and I think that that Apple has has pockets of greatness but in some ways has drifted away from from doing the basics really well so we started with the product line we looked at the product roadmap going out for a few years and we said a lot of this doesn’t make sense and it’s way too much stuff and there’s not enough focus and so we actually got rid of 70% of the stuff in the product roadmap I mean I couldn’t figure out the damn product line after a few weeks I kept saying what is this model how does this fit and I started talking to customers and they couldn’t figure it out either and so you’re gonna see the product line get much simpler and you’re gonna see the product line get much better and there’s some new stuff coming out that’s incredibly nice in addition we’ve been able to focus a lot more on the 30% of the gems and add some new stuff in that it’s gonna take us in some whole new directions so we are incredibly excited about the products and I think we’re we’re really thinking differently about the kinds of products we have to build and the engineering team is incredibly excited I mean I came out of the meeting with people that had just gotten their projects cancelled and they were they were three feet off the ground with excitement because they finally understood where in the heck we were going and they were really excited about the strategy in the same way we I think have not been as we have not kept up with innovations in our distribution well I can give you an example I’m sure was talked about this morning but you know we’ve got any from from two to three months of inventory in our manufacturing supplier pipeline and about an equal amount in our distribution channel pipeline so we’re having to make guesses for five six months in advance about what the customer wants and we’re not smart enough to do that I think is not smart enough to do that so what we’re gonna do is get really simple and start taking inventory out of those pipelines so we can let the customer tell us what we what they want and we can respond to it super fast and you’re gonna see us to be doing a lot of things like that today’s is just the first of many things we’re going to be doing with you so we’re going to be not only I think catching up to where the best of the best are in distribution but we’re gonna actually be innovating and be breaking some new ground I think in the coming several months and I’m pretty excited about that as well in the distribution manufacturing side of things and that gets us to the marketing side of things to me marketing is about values this is a very complicated world it’s a very noisy world and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us no company is and so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us now Apple fortunately is one of the half-a-dozen best brands in the whole world right up there with Nike Disney Coke Sony it is one of the greats of the greats not just in this country but all around the globe and but but but even a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality and the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years and we need to bring it back the way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds it’s not to talk about MIPS and megahertz it’s not to talk about why we’re better than Windows the dairy industry tried for 20 years convince you that milk was good for you it’s a lie but they tried anyway and the sales were gone like this and then they tried got milk and the sales have gone like this got milk dozen even talked about the product metric that focuses on the absence of the product but but but the best example of all and and one of the greatest jobs of of marketing and though if the universe has ever seen as Nike remember Nike sells a commodity they sell shoes and yet when you think of Nike you feel something different than a shoe company in their ads as you know they don’t ever talk about the products they don’t ever tell you about their air soles and might have better than Reeboks air soles what is Nike doing they’re advertising they they honor great athletes and they honor great athletics that’s who they are that’s what they are about Apple spends a fortune on advertising you’d never know it you’ve never known so when I got here we Apple just fired their agency we’re doing a competition with 23 agencies that you know four years from now would have picked one and we blew that up and we we hired Shaddai the ad agency that I was fortunate enough to work with years ago we created some award-winning work including the the commercial voted the best ad ever made 1984 by advertising professionals and we started working about eight weeks ago and what we the question we asked was our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for where do we fit in this world and what we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done although we do that well we do that better than almost anybody in some cases but apples about something more than that Apple at the core its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better that’s what we believe and we’ve had the opportunity to work with people like that we’ve had an opportunity to work with people like you with software developers with customers who have done it in some big and some small ways and we believe that in this world people can change it for the better and that those people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do and so what we’re going to do in our first brand marketing campaign in several years is to is to get back to that core value a lot of things have changed the markets a totally different place than it was a decade ago and apples totally different in Apple’s place in it it’s totally different and believe me the products and the distribution strategy and manufacturing are totally different and we understand that but values and core values those things shouldn’t change the things that Apple believed in at its core are the same things that Apple really stands for today and so we wanted to find a way to communicate this and what we have is something that I am I’m very moved by it honors those people who have changed the world some of them are living some of them are not but the ones that aren’t as you’ll see you know that if they ever use the computer it would have been a Mac and the theme of the campaign is is think difference is the people honoring the people who think different and who move this world forward and it’s it is what we are about it touches the soul of this company so I’m gonna go ahead and roll it and I hope that you feel the same way about it I do here’s to the crazy ones The Misfits the rebels the troublemakers the round pegs in the square holes ones who see things differently they’re not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo you can quote them disagree with them glorify or vilify them about the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things they push the human race forward and while some may see them as the crazy ones we see genius because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do [Music] so that puts it out there and that puts us out there saying this is who we are this is what we stand for I don’t you like it yeah good I I know that some people will criticize us for you know not talking about all those things about why we have better plug-and-play but we’ve got to let people know who Apple is and why it’s still relevant in this world and I think this will do a pretty good job we are breaking this campaign this Sunday in a rather poetic way the wonderful world of Disney is restarting on ABC and the first thing they’re showing this Sunday night I believe it’s at 7:00 o’clock is the network premiere of Toy Story and we we’re gonna have to 60-second spots this commercial will run twice once in the first hour and once in the second hour we are then gonna break some newspaper ads in the journal The Times the mercury the examiner USA Today really stating the manifesto the words and then I’m gonna show you what’s gonna break within two weeks we’ve got some phenomenal prints this ad will run throughout most of October on television and we’re breaking some phenomenal print within a few weeks mostly on the back covers of magazines some on the inside we’re got some incredible billboards and we’re even painting some giant walls and in about five or six major cities we’re core I show you the stuff I want to let you know that in this day and age to use any of these people whether alive or dead you need major permission from them either themselves if they’re alive or they’re our state’s representatives if they’re dead almost all of these people have never appeared in an advertisement before and never would until we asked them I mean I got permission from Yoko Ono a few days ago to use John and it’s been an incredibly moving experience for me that these people both living and dead their estates have felt so strongly about Apple

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Posted by Ian

Ian has marketed for some of the world's best-known brands like Hewlett-Packard, Ryder, Force Factor, and CIT Bank. His content has been downloaded 50,000+ times and viewed by over 90% of the Fortune 500. His marketing has been featured in Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Adweek, Business Insider, Seeking Alpha, Tech Crunch, Y Combinator, and Lifehacker. With over 10 startups under his belt, Ian's been described as a serial entrepreneur— a badge he wears with pride. Ian's a published author and musician and when he's not obsessively testing the next marketing idea, he can be found hanging out with family and friends north of Boston.

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