I have five memos on this one topic. Apparently I can’t leave it alone.
The first one goes like this, roughly:
“People say Jobs hated marketing and branding. But if you dig into why, I think what he disliked was the outer wrapping. The item is the most important thing. It has to be good. Design comes after that. Always after. Otherwise you end up a swindler.”
Strong words from past me. Another memo is even shorter: “Branding and marketing are just the surface.”
So I went and checked. Did Steve Jobs actually hate marketing?
Short answer: no. In a 1997 internal Apple meeting introducing “Think Different,” Jobs said, “To me, marketing is about values.” What my memo got right is the order: the product comes first, and the wrapping comes after.
What he said in 1997
In September 1997, Jobs stood up in front of Apple employees to introduce a new ad campaign. It became “Think Different.” You can watch the whole thing online.
His opening line was this:
“To me, marketing is about values.”
Then: “This is a very complicated world, it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not gonna get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want’em to know about us.”
That doesn’t sound like a man who hates marketing. That sounds like a man who has thought about marketing more than most marketing people.
He used Nike as an example. “Remember Nike sells a commodity. They sell shoes.” And yet, he pointed out, Nike’s ads didn’t talk about the shoes.
Then he said what Apple was about. “What we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done,” he said. “Although we do that well.” Apple’s core value, he said, was “that people with passion can change the world for the better.”
(Fun detail: he called computers “boxes.” The man was not precious about the hardware.)
And Apple cared about the wrapping from the start
It goes back further than that.
In 1977, Apple’s early investor Mike Markkula wrote a short memo called “The Apple Marketing Philosophy.” It had three points: empathy, focus, and something he called “impute.”
The impute part is blunt. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote.
And then: “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.”
So Apple, from very early on, believed presentation matters. A lot. In capital letters.
“Jobs hated marketing” doesn’t hold up. If anything, the company was built on caring about it.
Half wrong, half right
That’s my verdict on my own memo.
The wrong part: “Jobs hated marketing.” He didn’t. He gave a whole speech saying marketing is about values.
The right part is the order of things.
Look at what Markkula actually wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality.” The product comes first in that sentence. The cover is what keeps a good product from looking cheap. It isn’t there to hide a bad one.
And Jobs, quoted in Rob Walker’s 2003 New York Times Magazine story “The Guts of a New Machine,” said this about design: “Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like.” And: “It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”
That’s my memo, more or less. The thing itself comes first.
Wrapping paper or the thing inside
Another of my memos asks it as a question: “Will you be the wrapping paper, or the thing inside?”
And then gives a few examples, which I still like:
A restaurant should be the place with great food, more than the place with a great sign and a cool interior.
A person should be someone with great thoughts, more than someone who just dresses well.
And then, of course, the memo turns on itself: “Is design the thing inside, or the wrapping paper?”
Past me loved a cliffhanger.
Where I landed
One more memo:
“Why decorate and wrap it? The real thing is to just show the core, plainly. Being good at design and being good at lying are different.”
That last line is the one I believe the most.
Here’s how I read all of this together now.
Wrapping is fine. Wrapping is even good, when it tells the truth about what’s inside. Markkula’s “impute” works when the product really does have the qualities you’re presenting. A great restaurant with a nice sign is still a great restaurant.
The swindle is when the wrapping is doing all the work. When the sign is great and the food is not. When the box is beautiful and the thing inside breaks in a week.
Another memo of mine just says: “Quality has to be better than design.” Which is the short version of all of this.
For me, restaurants are where this shows up the most.
The shiny places in the city are often expensive, the portions are small, and a lot of the time the food just isn’t that good. Some nights I’m pretty sure I’m paying for the lighting.
Then there are the worn-out little places in the countryside. I’ve walked into one expecting nothing and eaten something I’ll remember for the rest of my life. No sign worth mentioning. No interior to speak of. Just the thing inside.
The short answer
Did Steve Jobs hate marketing? No. He said marketing is about values, and he meant it.
What I think he didn’t like was marketing with nothing behind it. Even in that meeting, the campaign was there to say what Apple believed. The ads were about something real, at least to him.
I can’t know what he really felt. I only have what he said, and my own memos.
And my memos still say the same thing. The item first. Then the wrapping.
Sources: Steve Jobs, Apple internal meeting introducing “Think Different,” September 1997 (transcript, video); Mike Markkula, “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” (1977), as reported by NBC News and Forbes; Rob Walker, “The Guts of a New Machine”, The New York Times Magazine, November 30, 2003.
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