Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2015. Tim Cook is described as Apple’s new head, as of 2015, although he became CEO in 2011. The remarks on tech YouTubers’ unboxing videos reflect 2015.
Mike Markkula played a very important role in Apple’s growth. Although things between Jobs and Markkula would go wrong over the years, the truth is that he was one of the few people Jobs listened to carefully.
Markkula was an excellent business strategist, and he became a kind of father figure and mentor to Steve Jobs. He gave Jobs some key lessons in marketing and sales, and his years of experience helped steer Jobs onto the right business path, although only for a while, as the official biography of Steve Jobs shows.
Markkula always told Jobs that he should never start a company to get rich. The goal of every successful entrepreneur should be to make something you believe in and build a company that lasts.
Many other great entrepreneurs do not share this view. They think a company is always for sale, and sometimes they create companies with the sole aim of selling them, taking the money and investing it in new, more ambitious projects.
In Apple’s early days, once Markkula had joined the company, he wrote down on a sheet of paper for Steve Jobs what he considered the three most important principles a company should have, ones its founder should never forget. He titled it “The Apple Marketing Philosophy”:
1. Empathy.
You must have an intimate connection with the customer’s feelings. “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.”
2. Focus.
“In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.”
3. Impute.
This principle is about how people form an opinion of a company or a product based on the signals it sends.
“People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”
Clearly Jobs, who acknowledged that he shared Markkula’s values, followed these principles and cared obsessively about marketing and image, down to the smallest details of packaging.
Apple wants the moment you open the box of an iPhone or an iPad to give you a first tactile and visual sense of what the product will be. It could save a lot of money on its product boxes, but the company wants the user experience to be positive from the very first contact with the product: the packaging.
And it is a pattern that Tim Cook, Apple’s new head, has continued, aware that tech YouTubers now routinely upload videos of themselves unboxing the iPhone to show it to their thousands or millions of followers. Apple wants the visual experience to be perfect, because it knows that if people like the “cover”, sales go up.
See also: Steve Jobs’s three keys to a successful meeting
Featured image: The wub, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
