Stay hungry, stay foolish

By: Sarah Koch

As we all by now know, with yesterday came the end of an era when Steve Jobs passed away at the age of 56.  As I have read articles and watched special news reports about this amazing business man, I realized that Steve Jobs was not only one of the most incredible creative minds of our time and an innovator.  He was also an absolute genius when it comes to understanding exactly what we are studying in this class – the customer. 

Steve Jobs, through Apple, not only created products that people wanted and ultimately loved.  He created products that the customer needed, before we even knew that we needed them.  Jobs even said, himself, “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them.  By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.” 

As future marketers of our own companies’ products or services, I think that we can draw inspiration from this message.  As we have read in several articles, the marketing world has moved away from creating a product and ad content that we want and pushing it at the customer.  The creative focus has moved from the product to the customer.  We must discover an unmet need in the marketplace and seek to fill that.  Steve Jobs and Apple have gone beyond this, identifying not just what we need now, but what we WILL need going forward. 

I’m sure there are ideas and projects running through Apple right now that we can’t even begin to imagine we would ever want or need.  My brother-in-law works for Apple, and for years he has been working on a project that our family could know nothing about.  Then in June, we find out that his “baby” has been the split keyboard for the iPad, which will be release on iOS 5 next week.  Before I had ever even laid hand on an iPad, Apple was busy working on how to fulfill needs that customers didn’t even know they had.

This ability to see what we don’t see and to be so customer focused has created such intense brand loyalty for Apple.  People are in love with their Macs, their iPhones, and their iPads.  These products have become such an intimate part of our lives.  Sometimes it’s hard to remember life, or the music industry, or the communications industry before them.  As President Obama said last night in his statement, “And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.”

So what lessons can we take from Apple’s success?  How can we apply them to our own companies?  Can we all become so customer focused, with the ability to not only identify needs but to essentially create them?  Or is that something that only visionaries like Steve Jobs can accomplish?  I will be curious to see how Apple will fare going forward as the question “Will Steve like this?” fades from their conversations. 

For those of you who haven’t seen or heard it yet, be sure to check out his commencement address at Stanford University in 2005.  Very inspirational.  “Stay hungry, stay foolish.”