Steve Jobs revolutionized marketing with a customer-first approach, emphasizing simplicity and powerful storytelling. He integrated design with functionality, making products their own best advertisements. Jobs’ strategies, from anticipating customer needs to creating emotional connections through stories, provide lasting lessons on engaging and inspiring customers, underscoring his legacy in innovation and business strategy.
“Ask the pizza man. Successful marketing starts with positioning.
This principle is the focus of Al Ries and Jack Trout’s marketing classic, Positioning. In its most important essentials, Positioning says:
1. You must position yourself in your prospect’s mind.
2. Your position should be singular: one simple message.
3. Your position must set you apart from your competitors.
4. You must sacrifice. You cannot be all things to all people; you must focus on one thing.”
Excerpt From: Beckwith, Harry. “Selling the Invisible.”
“From its earliest days, eBay has always had an “Everything Else” category. This is where people could buy and sell things that we at eBay couldn’t anticipate people might want to trade. And while we anticipated a lot (there were and still are thousands of categories), some of the biggest innovations and biggest surprises came from monitoring what customers wanted to do. We realized early on in the eBay situation that this was where much of the best innovation was happening, and we did everything we could think of to encourage and nurture customers using the eBay marketplace to be able to buy and sell nearly anything. While the marketplace may have been originally designed to facilitate trading items like electronics and collectibles, soon people started trading concert tickets, fine art, and even cars. Today, amazingly, eBay is one of the largest used car companies in the world.”
Excerpt From: Cagan, Marty. “INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love.”
“All products are not created equal. There’s a hierarchy in the mind that prospects use in making decisions. For each category, there is a product ladder in the mind. On each rung is a brand name. Take the car rental category. Hertz got into the mind first and wound up on the top rung. Avis got in second and National got in third. Your marketing strategy should depend on how soon you got into the mind and consequently which rung of the ladder you occupy. The higher the better, of course.”
Excerpt From: Al Ries. “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Exposed and Explained by the World’s Two.”.
“I’m not sure how high it would have gone but I do know that it only takes two people to push up the price at an auction. Most of the people in the room didn’t bid at all and very few people bid beyond £1,500. But that doesn’t matter. When the supply is “one” and there are “two” who want it, then that price keeps going up. Two people who desire something is enough to oversubscribe the one person who has it. The price keeps going up until one entity gives in.
When Facebook purchased cross-platform mobile messaging app WhatsApp for $19 billion, the number seemed ridiculous to almost everyone on the planet – except one other bidder. Google was the other company who wanted to buy WhatsApp and the two rival companies bid the price into the stratosphere. ”
Excerpt From: Daniel Priestley. “Oversubscribed: How to Get People Lining up to do Business with You.”
A Character – has a problem – and meets a guide – who gives them a plan – and calls them to action – that helps them avoid failure – and ends in a success
The first and most significant impact on human communication is actually body language. Bad news, he said. When you are selling over the phone to an Internet lead, body language is gone.The next is tone. This is where I shine. I am a wordsmith, but I’m also from the south and I talk slow. I sound super trustworthy over the phone, but also smart. Honest, but sharp. Educated, but not “better than you.” It is very difficult to teach people how to improve their tone, but let me make it very clear upfront that the words in the script that you will learn in this book work a lot better if your tone is great. In fact, if you add tone and body language, it is 93 percent of how humans communicate.
Excerpt From: Chris Smith. “The Conversion Code: Capture Internet Leads, Create Quality Appointments, Close More Sales.”
“Nobody can look away from a good story. In fact, neuroscientists claim the average human being spends more than 30 percent of their time daydreaming . . . unless they’re reading, listening to, or watching a story unfold. Why? Because when we are engaged in a story, the story does the daydreaming for us.
Story is the greatest weapon we have to combat noise, because it organizes information in such a way that people are compelled to listen.”
Excerpt From: Donald Miller. “Building a StoryBrand.”
“If I had to summarize the essence of this book in one sentence it would be, “the fastest path to the money.” I’ve purposely put this as early as humanly possible in the book because I don’t want to waste your time. I know for a certainty that this opening sentence will be off putting to a large number of people and frankly I’d much prefer they read someone else’s business book full of ear-tickling clichés like “follow your passion,” “work hard,” “hire the right people,” blah blah blah.”
Excerpt From: Allan Dib. “The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand out From The Crowd.”
“Yin (not her real name) is in her mid-twenties, lives in Palo Alto, California, and attends Stanford University. She has all the composure and polish you’d expect of a student at a prestigious school, yet she succumbs to a persistent habit throughout her day. She can’t help it; she is compulsively hooked on Instagram… But at its core Instagram is an example of an enterprising team—conversant in psychology as much as technology—that unleashed a habit-forming product on users who subsequently made it a part of their daily routines. Yin doesn’t realize she’s hooked”
Excerpt From: Nir Eyal. “Hooked.”
