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.

The Pivot

The Pivot. That key moment when a business needs to change its business model, target, product - sometimes all three - dramatically to either survive or thrive. At larger companies, it can be wrenching to acknowledge that it is needed and even more difficult to follow through. The entire enterprise is build around a business model, and the realization that it's not working anymore is akin to (especially if the founder is still in control) to acknowledging their beautiful child has turned into a monster as an adult. Kodak had to transform itself with the rapid demise of film cameras (see http://buswk.co/8EEIae for an overview, http://bit.ly/mVcA63 for the details from a financial standpoint, and http://bit.ly/g5Hpmf for the most recent update). Jeffery Hayzlett is making a nice career writing books and lecturing about Kodak's success. IBM also pivoted, moving from a hardware to a services company. But for every big company success, there are legions of failures, in some cases because the pivot to the new business didn't match the speed at which the old business model was collapsing (GM and Chrysler, which survived only because of US bailouts, are two examples. So is Borders, which didn't get a bailout). To a large extent, that's what is happening in publishing today, particularly to newspapers. Newspapers are a Baby boomer item - people under the age of 35 simply don't read them in there paper form. I wrote a couple of years ago that the New York Times was making a critical mistake not charging a subscription fee (http://lewisgoldman.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-nytimescom-should-charge.html), which they finally corrected more than a year later. Their most recent financial results touted 224,000 online subscribers in the first quarter of launch. They've even started to advertise the digital version seperately from the print subscriptions. With the Ipad version, you'll see an acceleration of digital subscribers and, most importantly, re-engagement with a younger demographic which will pay off in advertising dollars. To complete the Pivot, they need to acknowledge their print version is for Boomers, increase the typeface (Please!), and focus on stories and news that that demo is interested in reading.

While big companies have trouble with the Pivot, start-ups can also struggle with it. The biggest impediment tends to be the passion and focus of start-up CEO's. They had a vision which they sold to investors, employees, the press, customers. Admitting that vision either won't work or is missing a bigger opportunity is an admission of failure, and many start-up founders struggle and delay the Pivot as a result. Having worked in business that wouldn't or couldn't Pivot, both big and small, it's clear to me that acknowledging the need for a pivot and then moving as rapidly as possible towards the new business model is critical for success. Otherwise competitors without the baggage of another business will pass you by.