DRESS UP YOUR NUMBERS 107
of potential customers. Jobs makes his numbers specific, rele-
vant, and contextual.
Specific. Relevant. Contextual.
Let’s take a look at two other examples in which Jobs made
numbers specific, relevant, and contextual. On February 23,
2005, Apple added a new iPod to its lineup. The iPod featured
30 GB of storage. Now, most consumers could not tell you what
30 GB means to them. They know it’s “better” than 8 GB, but
that’s about it. Jobs would never announce a number that big
without context, so he broke it down in language his audience
could understand. He said 30 GB of storage is enough memory
for 7,500 songs, 25,000 photos, or up to 75 hours of video. The
description was specific (7,500 songs, versus “thousands” of
songs), relevant to the lives of his audience (people who want
mobile access to songs, photos, and video), and contextual
because he chose to highlight numbers that his core audience of
consumers would care about most.
In a second example, Jobs chose Macworld 2008 to hold a
two-hundreth-day birthday celebration for the iPhone. Jobs
said, “I’m extraordinarily pleased that we have sold four mil-
lion iPhones to date.” He could have stopped there (and most
presenters would have done just that), but Jobs being Jobs, he
continued: “If you divide four million by two hundred days,
that’s twenty thousand iPhones every day on average.” Jobs
could have stopped there as well, but he kept going, adding that
the iPhone had captured nearly 20 percent of the market in that
short period. OK, you might be saying, surely Jobs would have
stopped there. He didn’t.
“What does this mean in terms of the overall market?” he
asked.^4 He then showed a slide of the U.S. smartphone mar-
ket share with competitors RIM, Palm, Nokia, and Motorola.
RIM’s BlackBerry had the highest market share at 39 percent.
The iPhone came in second at 19.5 percent. Jobs then compared
iPhone’s market share to that of all of the other remaining com-
petitors. Jobs concluded that the iPhone matched the combined