TC#007 You are not Steve Jobs
And you shouldn’t be.
Yes, he was a sensation and was a legendary Entrepreneur and he expanded our consciousness by showing us what might be possible.
But …
He belonged to a different time.
Back then, television was the chief distribution channel. A little bit of internet, but not much. And it wasn’t as cluttered as it is now.
People weren’t being bombarded 24/7 with advertisements and there were still relatively ‘fewer’ options for any particular product or service.
Jobs could get away with his marketing campaigns which would nowadays be only “pretentious” at best or “confusing” at worst. And he did. Spectacularly.
It worked wonders and sparked a Cambrian explosion of marketing campaigns that have for more than a decade deluged us with Freudian tactics that could only work in isolation and not when every third product or service was claiming to be cool or edgy or elegant or royal or ... you get the idea.
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I’m not saying that being those things isn’t good. After all, a brand is still mostly identified via the ‘associations’ it elicits — nobody gets attached to a corporate. It’s always about what the brand “represents”.
But times have since changed. Dramatically.
It turns out that it is very difficult to create any kind of association in your audience’s mind unless yours is the only advertisement they are seeing, again and again. The fundamental rule of Marketing — be everywhere all the time at once — is still applicable. But that is a fight that only the biggest and the most privileged players can fight.
For the rest of us, the best tactic is to be so specific that you’re almost boring.
If you are not ubiquitous enough (and you can’t be, if you’re reading this newsletter), then the only option is to be specific enough. That is the only way to make sure that people who need to remember you, remember you.
As a fun exercise: have a complete stranger look at your website and answer who is your customer.
Have a great day.