Apple’s marketing and promotion have never been traditionally
sexy. The message is not that owning an Apple product will make you
more attractive to the opposite (or same) sex. Rather—and this is
common with great luxury brands—the message is that it will make
you better than your sexual competitors: elegant, brilliant, rich, and
passionate. You will be perfection: cool, shit together, listening to
music in your pocket and swiping through pics of your latest trip that
look professional but that you took on your phone. You’ll have the
ultimate earthly life. You’ll feel closer to God. Or at least closer to the
Jesus Christ of business, the pinnacle of success, the uncompromising
genius, sexy beast Steve Jobs.
Business Growth and Biology
It would seem the Four Horsemen already have a monopoly on the key
organs of the human body. So, what’s left? And if there is no other
great market opportunity, how do you compete with them?
Let’s take the latter first. The current horsemen look so gigantic,
rich, and dominant that it would seem impossible to attack them
directly. And that’s probably the case, but history suggests there are
other strategies. After all, each of these companies in their day had to
take on equally dominant and established corporate giants—and beat
them.
For example, when Apple started out it faced several huge
competitors. IBM was one of the biggest companies in the world and
dominated electronics in the workplace (as the saying went, “Nobody
ever got fired for buying Big Blue”). Hewlett-Packard, almost as big a
company, and arguably the best-run company of all time, owned the
scientific handheld and desktop calculator business. And Digital
Equipment was running neck and neck with both companies in
minicomputers—and winning. How could Apple, started by two
scruffy phone hackers in a garage, possibly compete with these
monsters?
It did so with a combination of fearlessness, superior design, and
luck. You know about the first two, but the third might surprise you.
Steve Jobs knew he had a world-class product in the Apple II thanks to