Marketing Lessons from Steve Jobs
I’ve been on a Steve Jobs kick, mainlining “Founders” podcasts by David Senra about the Apple founder. As I listen to “Founders,” I often have the urge to pull out the marketing lessons. Sharp Pen is all about the idea that the CEO is the chief evangelist: i.e., we help our clients practice founder-led marketing. In the era of social, that’s never been more compelling or easier to implement. But the stories of great founders show founder-led marketing has long been a thing.
The best founders don’t look down on marketing. They don’t view it as a purely tactical add-on: the team of doers you loop in after the strategic thinking has been done by the product, strategy, and finance teams. They view the story as a key component of the creation of the product itself.
Moreover, as Steve’s wisdom illustrates, great founders don’t view marketing as ‘storytelling’ in the sense of spin — weaving a false narrative that misleads the customer. On the contrary, they think of marketing in the first-principles way we advocate at Sharp Pen: It’s about getting the message in front of customers to build trust. If the message is clear, differentiated, and urgent, you’ll not only attract attention and build trust but deepen differentiation and urgency along the way.
That said, here are five particular takes from Steve, some of them direct quotes and some paraphrases, as well as a bit of context from me:
1. “Good PR educates people; that’s all it is. You can’t con people in this business.”
A lot of founders dislike PR because they view it as spin or wishy-washy BS. That's the wrong way to look at it.
At its core, PR is very simple. We want our customers to understand what we do, how we're different, and why they need us now.
You're educating. Look at it that way, and it's not icky. Plus, it's essential. People can't buy from you if they don't know what you do and how you can help.
2. “The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller. The storyteller sets the vision, values, and agenda of an entire generation that is to come.”
At its best, founder-led marketing not only educates the buyer but also shapes their very understanding of the founder’s category. In other words, you don’t just teach the customer about the iPhone; you reinvent the phone and the customer’s standards for it.
The same is true in adtech, especially at this pivotal, generational moment defined by AI. The industry map is getting redrawn. A charismatic and consistent founder can do more than insert themselves into, say, the DSP category. They can get advertisers to reassess what to expect from a DSP.
3. Upon coming back to Apple, I realized we had a zillion and one products. After a few weeks, I couldn’t even figure out why our customers should use one product over another. If I couldn’t figure it out, how could the customer?
This is a paraphrase of Steve’s experience upon returning to Apple. He laid off thousands of people and cut the product line down to four items.
You might think this is a product lesson, not a marketing lesson. But the same logic applies. You need to think about marketing from the perspective of the customer. Typically, companies make marketing too complicated because they’re too in the weeds of their own operations — they see all the little nuances of their products. Customers rarely appreciate the products in the same way. Too much complexity just confuses them; talking about every little detail is inappropriate for any but a very particular type of customer.
Good marketing simplifies. You only have the privilege of being known for one thing, maybe two. So, pick that one thing carefully, and repeat it ad nauseum until your customers and your competitors’ customers remember it.
4. Apple has one of the best brands in the world. But they’re not doing anything with it. You could spend billions of dollars building a brand worse than Apple’s. What is Apple? It’s people who think outside the box. They want to do something with a computer greater than a job.
This was also part of Steve’s reaction upon returning to Apple and finding that the company had lost focus. The lesson: The strongest brands rest on a linkage between the product and the customer. And for that linkage to shine through, the company needs to remain focused. An unfocused or undefined product cannot foster brand-product-customer alignment.
Consider the adtech classic “Beeswax is for control freaks.” A highly customizable DSP for the control-freak advertisers who wanted it. If you don’t have clarity on what’s different about your product and who it is for, you can’t build a powerful, differentiated brand.
5. My dream is that every person in the world will have an Apple computer. To do that, we’ve got to be a great marketing company.
Even though Jobs was famously product-obsessed, his second focus was advertising, and Apple clearly spent a lot of time, money, and energy on marketing its world-class products. The great founders generally understand that, while they need a superb product, that product will not reach its full potential unless marketed effectively.
Marketing exists to get your product in front of more people, clarify its value, explain how it differs from the alternatives, induce the desire to buy it now, and, at its best, foster trust in the company and the product.
None of that is ‘soft.’ None of it is optional. It’s critical for any company with big ambitions. The greater founders recognize that and play a lead role in building a brand around their products.
Steve Jobs was a great founder. He was also clearly the chief evangelist for Apple and a practitioner of founder-led marketing. If you’re a CEO reading this, to build a great company, you must step up to the plate and play a role in marketing, too.
