Steve Jobs was a classical marketer.

On 23 September 1997, Steve Jobs stands in a room full of his own people. Apple is in acute financial trouble; in August, arch-rival Microsoft had to prop it up with 150 million dollars. And what does he open with? Not a product, a roadmap or a reorganisation. With marketing: "To me, marketing is about values."

Jobs is quoted today as proof that classical marketing is dead. Supposedly no research, no segments, no four Ps, just genius and a black turtleneck. Check the record and you find the opposite: a man who practised the classical craft more strictly than the handbooks dared to prescribe.

Values, not specifications

His example that afternoon in 1997 is Nike. Nike sells shoes, a commodity, and never talks about air soles. “They honor great athletes. And they honor great athletics.” Think of Nike and you feel something other than a shoe factory.

In that same meeting he introduces Think Different: a campaign without a single product in it. Apple did have computers to sell, but kept them out of the picture on purpose; the first iMac only arrived in 1998. First give the brand meaning, then sell.

Read it back now and you recognise what Binet and Field later underpinned with data: brand building and activation each do a different job, and you need both, in a balance that differs by market. Jobs chose brand meaning without that study, in the middle of a crisis. When the pressure for immediate sales is highest, brand building is often the first thing cut. He did the opposite.

The sequence

Earlier that year, in May at WWDC, Jobs is told from the audience that he does not know what he is talking about. His answer became the best-known sequencing lesson in the trade: “You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” Everyone quotes that line. Almost nobody quotes what followed: “I’ve made this mistake probably more than anybody else in this room, and I’ve got the scar tissue to prove it.”

It is not vision, it is discipline. Not: this is what we can build, who do we sell it to. But: this is what someone must experience, so this is what we must be able to build. The direction of that arrow is the whole difference.

One line per product

“1,000 songs in your pocket” (2001). Not: a five gigabyte hard disk with FireWire. The iPhone was “an iPod, a phone, an internet communicator” (2007). The MacBook Air was “the world’s thinnest notebook” and came out of an envelope on stage (2008).

The best-known launches carried one dominant idea, phrased in the life of the buyer, not in the language of the technology. That one line is more than copywriting. It is a hard test of whether the thinking is finished: whoever cannot sum up their product in one line has not yet chosen what it means.

The portfolio as positioning

Back in 1997, Jobs cut dozens of product lines down to a two-by-two matrix: consumer or professional, desktop or portable. “Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.”

That gets told as a product decision. It was just as much a positioning decision. A brand that offers a lot without a clear logic is hard to understand, to remember and to sell. A salesperson with four products can explain all four. In Rumelt’s later language, that is a guiding policy: one line of policy every next choice can be tested against. The portfolio was the positioning.

Recognisable down to the cord

Most headphones were black. Apple kept the iPod’s earbuds consistently white, and suddenly every iPod owner on the street was recognisable. From 2003 the silhouette campaign amplified exactly that signal: black dancers, white wire, done.

It is what Sharp and Romaniuk later called distinctive assets: signals that identify a brand before you read its name. Jobs simply did it. Same principle in the box: Apple designed the unpacking as part of the product, not as the protection around it.

Build the channel, own the moment

In 2001 Apple opened its own shops, because existing retail could not show the Mac properly: demonstration, explanation and brand presentation all fell short. Analyst David Goldstein gave the concept two years; after that, he said, Apple would be turning out the lights on “a very painful and expensive mistake”. In 2012, according to RetailSails, the Apple Stores topped American retail: over 6,000 dollars in sales per square foot, twice the figure of number two, Tiffany & Co.

The lesson is not: open shops. The lesson is: control where people experience you, and if that channel does your product no justice, build your own.

The same went for the moment itself. The Stevenote had a fixed dramaturgy: build up the problem, cast the existing solutions as the villain, the product as the resolution, “one more thing”. The iPhone presentation of 2007 became world news in itself, months before a single phone was on sale. So read the secrecy beforehand not only as paranoia, but also as inventory management: news can only be sold once.

What NeXT proves

So far the hagiography. Now the part that makes it interesting.

The same man, the same aesthetic and the same launch theatre did not produce a mass market at NeXT. The first model, a 6,500 dollar workstation, found a niche; in total NeXT sold around 50,000 computers. The Power Mac G4 Cube (2000): beautiful, and shelved in July 2001 for lack of demand. Marketing strengthened Apple where product, price, channel and timing were right together. Where they were not, no keynote saved it.

That is why Jobs is not proof that classical marketing is dead. He is proof of the opposite. At Apple, marketing was never the department that communicates afterwards; it was the logic that held product, price, distribution and communication in one hand. That is how the four Ps were meant: not as four departments, but as one system.

The no-market-research frame deserves the same correction. The full line (BusinessWeek, 1998): “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” It was about focus groups as a design method, not about ignoring customers. Jobs did not reject customer insight; he distrusted people’s verdict on things they had no frame of reference for yet. The final filter was his own taste and judgement. That is the one part you cannot copy.

The analysis

What you can take from it is the sequence and the discipline. Four questions to hold your own marketing against:

1. Does your brand stand for something, or does it list what you supply?
2. Does every plan start with what the customer must experience, or with what the factory can make?
3. Can your best salesperson sum up every offer in one line?
4. What did you cut this year?

Whoever cannot answer these four does not have a communication problem but a choice problem. That is where month one of every programme starts: your marketing reviewed, the choice at your boardroom table, and the first work already live. Including that one line.

Further reading: Mental availability on why being known is half of winning, and Strategy is exclusion on why saying no positions you.