“Super-great ideas” waste neurons, time, and money. What-what?! Unless you embrace a REALITY DISTORTION FIELD like Steve Jobs you will, apart from a bunch of luck, barely have a lucrative, marketable, scalable “great idea” that can ever matter!
When Steve Jobs was trying to recruit John Sculley, the respected, mature president of Pepsi, to join Apple, Jobs famously said to Sculley:
“Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life — or come with me and change the world?”
“Without vision, the people cast off restraint“ – they don’t care!
This crazy framing of a choice, to a far more experienced and successful executive than Jobs, demonstrated Steve’s “reality distortion field” personality. He just wouldn’t take “no” for an answer. He had to find a way to analogize or allegorize or parable-ize a path forward for those who couldn’t quite see what he could see. He did this all the time to his coworkers, his Board, his customers, and anyone who didn’t see things the way he did! Jobs was selling Sculley with an alternate vision of “their” reality, contrasting the BORING (“selling sugar water”) with the extraordinary and rare possibility of changing the world, through his technology. And it wasn’t even really his technology. Jobs was a master of merging and combining ideas and technologies and diverse disciplines.
Apple became the first publicly traded U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization on August 2, 2018. Apple was also the first company to reach a $2 trillion market cap, achieving this milestone on August 19, 2020. On January 3, 2022, Apple became the first company to hit a $3 trillion market capitalization. As of June 2024, Apple was ranked as the second-largest company globally with a market cap of $3.230 trillion, slightly behind Microsoft at $3.322 trillion.
Steve Jobs was good, but not technologically brilliant. He was quirky relationally, and erratic in many ways.
But, there was something far more important going on.
Jobs’ leadership style was a mix of “accidental” charm, charisma, and mostly bold vision, convincing others to see possibilities beyond their conventional limitations. Jobs could reframe reality in a way that made his goals seem not just possible, but irresistible.
Steve Jobs’ REALITY DISTORTION FIELD was always more of his “secret sauce“, though not a strategy but rather who he was, than anything about technology, borrowed or developed.
There is something to learn in this, no doubt.
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Guillermo FlorGuillermo Flor
10 of Steve Jobs Marketing Strategies that made Apple Dominate the Market
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1. Speaking the Customer’s Language:
https://lnkd.in/dAswRNUf
2. Simplicity Sells:
https://lnkd.in/dn769hcf
3. Consistent Branding:
https://lnkd.in/dnugSfSK
4. Mystery and hype:
https://lnkd.in/dqTAGMss
5. Selling feelings, not features:
https://lnkd.in/dA-X8yJt
6. Controling the Conversation:
https://lnkd.in/dPRGaiRJ
7. Making it easy for customers to choose:
https://lnkd.in/dqSGz4QB
8. The Art of Storytelling:
https://lnkd.in/deNZSANU
9. Creating FOMO:
https://lnkd.in/duJJptAK
10. Creating a Distribution Channel:
https://lnkd.in/dTstYs4n
