Steve Jobs' magnificent marketing genius

I'm currently reading Steve Jobs' autobiography.

I'm not that far into it... Steve and Woz just founded Apple. Matter of fact, they were just about to create and introduce the Apple II to the market and slowly but surely they started picking up speed.

Now...

This part of the book is riddled with marketing and business advice and also nuggets applicable to just about everything let that be content, copy, or making a computer from scratch.

One of these lessons stood out for me.

It's something Steve said that was later quoted in a newspaper article. It went like this:

"If we can rap about their needs, feelings and motivations, we can respond appropriately by giving them what they want."

Isn't that interesting?

It always comes back to the market.

And apparently... Steve was very well known for being close to his market.

The book said Steve was very close - intimately close - to his market's needs, feeling,s and desires... which then in retrospect... allowed him to introduce solutions and products that even the market wasn't aware of they needed or wanted before Steve came up with them.

He knew his people more than anyone else who ran a computer company. And I think... If anything, then this was one of the major things that made Apple a success.

If it wasn't for this one thing...

Knowing his market better than anyone else.

Apple probably wouldn't be as big as it is.

I'm not saying that there weren't other factors, or that this principle solely was responsible for the success of this company. Far from it, actually.

Just knowing your market isn't enough.

There has to be action.

A plan.

And a whole lot of other resources that make a company grow as big as Apple. I would go as far as to say even some luck...

But still...

If it wasn't for Steve knowing his market this well. Apple would have probably taken a totally different route.

Or just ceased to exist like most tech start-ups did at that time.

Whatever the case.

This does deliver a very important point and a lesson that's worth taking seriously.

Know your damn market.

If you do... The lion's share of whatever you are trying to accomplish is already there.

Kristof Nemeth.