A friend recently sent me a great pitch video that Steve Jobs gave while he was at NeXT. The video is a fascinating piece of marketing history, especially because the endeavor turned out to be such a failure. While I realize that this is a pitch, pitches, like any other kind of story, have the effect of convincing the audience and the people telling it. He totally overestimated the need for usability at that point, in 1991, in the development of the workstation/pc market. In addition, he projected his tastes onto a market that, to this day, has an almost supernatural aversion to being cool.
I am struck by the difference, between this pitch and the iPod pitch, or even the Mac pitch from Nerds. He wasn’t framing the NeXT station’s differences from the point of view of benefits as perceived by the customer. Instead, he uses future tense language about how NeXT will be better and people will want what it does. Although he doesn’t seem to completely realize it, he makes the key insight that there was an audience out there that would appreciate an functionally and artistically elevated approach to an otherwise humdrum product category. His thinking was great, it was just his target that was wrong.
He needed a group of people to whom he could teach taste and elegance, and it turns out that consumers and the iPod let him do that. The best part about the iPod, aside from design, was that it changed the way people perceived the digital music player market. The positioning stroke of genius was the statement that the iPod held 5000 songs and let you take all of your music anywhere you went. It was the customer’s problem stated in the words they would use, and providing a solution to an immediate and tangible issue that they faced. Add to that the awesome experience of using the device (especially compared to competition), and you have something remarkable: a story that customers can tell each other, and an exclusive club of cool that has a badge that you carry around with you.
Most striking, for me, is the realization that Jobs, or someone, needs to be a pitch man, a maven of taste, to make Apple successful. He needs to radiate an understanding of cool. It is important because his goal is to get people to accept his definition of cool, and he knows it. He is totally right to leave the technical and user interaction innovations to someone else and be the man that can convince people that they want to be as cool as John Mayer.
