The core of marketing hasn’t changed throughout the years and despite the many techniques and approaches, there is one consequential truth, and that is, where there is a market in need, there is a product that can satisfy that need; I personally think that’s the key to successful marketing at its core: consumer satisfaction.” -Mary 🙂
The following four Steve Jobs videos brings us closer to the marketing genius that he was and lets us uncover his secrets and ideas on how to approach marketing. Then how he turned everything he touched into gold.
How to Define your Target and Market Share
Steve Jobs explains how difficult it is for any startup company to find and identify its target audience and market share. Start by looking up the competition and by asking yourself the following questions:
- What do your competitors offer and what market do they cover?
- Compare your product or services to the competition and ask yourself., “What your company offers that the competition does not– and that could be one of your Unique Selling Proposition.
- What markets do they cover with small market share? In other words, in what other sectors does the competitor participate and does a poor job at successfully delivering to that market. When market share is small, this is when you have an opportunity to market your product there and do it better.
Marketing is About Values
Marketing, Branding and Perception, ” our consumers want to know what is Apple and what we stand for.” What Steve conveys in the second video is that most companies talk more about the product but not so much about their culture. In other words, it is not about showing consumers a list of product’s features and discounts, but it is about selling them the soul of the company–its core values. Then demonstrate how these values contribute to creating a culture that others will want to be part of–build a community around your brand.
Lastly, how does the company’s services, products or purpose fit as part of humanity as a whole? As Steve said, “what is our [apple] place in this world?”
Come Up with a Strategy and Vision First by Thinking Where Can You Take The Consumer
Create a product or a marketing ad with the consumer in mind first. You’ve got to start with the customer’s experience and work backwards with the technology. You cannot start with the technology and then try to figure out where to sell it.
Staring up a company: Innovation, teamwork, entrepreneurship and leadership
Lastly, I leave you with this phenomenal video that shows how a startup company gets built in the first three months of iniciation. It does cover marketing and also provides a great insight into Steve Jobs entrepreneurial abilities and leadership skills.
From all of these videos, you, can recognize a few important keys to running a successful product launch and putting it to market, and they are the following:
- Believe in your product 100%. Then convince consumer to believe in it, too. Turning them into evangelist.
- Keep your team motivated. This is where leadership comes in hand. Investigate what keeps your staff motivated.
- Stick your schedule. I know this is always a though one, but there are times when it can be the determine factor to running a successful campaign. For example: you have to lunch a product or a marketing campaign designed to reach consumers on Christmas season, so being able –as a manager– to keep the team moving according to schedule is a most.
- Last and most important one: Putting a team that fits with the project and organization’s goals .
So How do you find employees that match your project and organizational culture, believes and goals?
According to Gallup’s latest research, the 34 leadership themes naturally cluster into four domains of leadership strength. The graph below helps you assess who is a better match for you in terms of working with the right client or forming team members with better matches.
The Four Domains of Leadership Strength
The graphic below shows the 34 themes sorted into the four domains of leadership strength.
THE FOUR DOMAINS:
Explaining the Four Domains: Executing, Influencing, relationship building and, strategic thinking
The Executing leader makes things happen. These type of people are your go-to guys when needing to solve a problem, implement a solution or who transform an idea into reality. The executing leader works effortlessly day and night to make things happen.
Steve Jobs could be considered an executing leader; he worked hard and made the team work hard as well until the ideal Macintosh computer became a reality.
Influential leader can become the CEO or top executive or even the president of a country. This type of individual can reach outside the organization or sell a team’s idea very well. They are ideal at influencing change, and they can be excellent sales people as well. Some examples of influential leaders are Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, and more recently Jack Ma, owner of alibaba.com, the world’s largest online business and with higher revenues than Amazon and eBay combined. Fortune magazine calls Mr. Ma brilliant at management who exhorts employees to “think big” and “work for their dreams!”
Relationship leader builds strong collaboration based on relationships. She or he becomes the essential glue that holds a team together. According to CCL, leaders in the workplace are not adept at either relationship building or collaboration. John Baldoni, a leadership communications consultant says,
“These results are not surprising given the state of American management. Our companies crave strong leaders; we tend to value the man who stands up and takes charge. But that model is in flux. One reason for this is the rising influence of women in the workplace; women tend to be more collaborative than men. Another is that it is collaboration that enables innovation, which plays a key role in a company’s ability to stay competitive.”
Baldoni wrote a very poignant peace “Great Leaders Build Off Great Relationships“. A good read – I recommend it.
Strategic leader: These type of leaders are great at running organizational long-term goals or keeping teams’ focused or keeping their direction, aimed at achieving a long-term goal. Strategic leadership skills are needed during times of organizational growth or during tough times. When resources are tight, it is even more important to ensure those resources are focused in the right areas.
In memory of Steve Jobs, “stay hungry, stay foolish.”