Steve Jobs, Intuitive marketer

Steve Jobs great life and career ended today at the all too young age of 56. Whatever he was like as a person and a boss, you can't argue the fact that he will go down in history as a great man who is more personally responsible for the digital era than anyone else. Jobs not only tranformed computers and portable digital devices, he revolutionized music and animation, and his design and product development genius led Apple to become the most valuable company in the world. His impact was so great that people felt connected to him on a personal level, evidenced by the outpouring of sadness both when he left Apple and upon news of his death. The devices and services he created are so personally important to people, the emotional connection with them was extended out to Jobs as the creator.

At the heart of his genius, Jobs was an incredibly intuitive marketer. His distrust for research was legendary - he allegedly never got consumer feedback on any product or service, insisting that customer input was unnecessary and even counter productive. How can you get input on a product the customer doesn't even know he or she wants yet? As someone who believes in using analytics to improve marketing outcomes, and that customer research is a key part of understanding unmet needs, I can only envy Jobs ability to know what people will covet. He had a sense of how to make products so cool, people lined up at stores and happily paid a premium to get them (there were never direct competitors, just inferior alternative products that did some of the tasks of the Apple product). He was ruthless in his vision and his attention to design details (his name is on 313 patents, ranging from PC's to package designs to the glass staircase in Apple stores), controlling every aspect of product design and development as well as marketing.

He knew what people wanted before they knew - a graphical interface for PC's to make them easier to use (the MacOS), portable music devices holding thousands of songs that looked as good as they sounded (iPod), a tablet that is quickly putting paper based media out of business(iPad), animation that seemed to leap off the screen (Pixar). Sure he had some misses (notably the Next Cube), but when you swing for the fences every time up (and Jobs did), you have to put up with the occassional strikeouts.

People have called him a modern Thomas Edison or Leonardo Da Vinci, and they are valid in terms of his record of invention. But I think the world has also lost one of it's greatest intuitive marketers, and it will be a long time before we see another one like him.