What We Can Learn from The Apple Marketing Philosophy

In 1977, Apple’s original angel investor, first chairman and second CEO, Armas Clifford “Mike” Markkula, Jr., wrote a one-page paper, The Apple Marketing Philosophy. Nearly a half century later, the 88-word document is as instructive as ever. In fact, the then-35-year-old electrical engineer and entrepreneur didn’t merely elucidate Apple’s approach to marketing; with The Apple Marketing Philosophy, Markkula issued a now-iconic decree on how to achieve business success. In three short paragraphs, the document covers a lot more than marketing. And the thing is: Most CEOs, CMOs and CXOs probably haven’t read it. As such, this is me bringing your attention to the three core tenets that guide one of the world’s most successful companies to this day. It demonstrates best practices — and how simply and succinctly you can inspire and shepherd your digital marketing and CX teams.

But first, The Apple Marketing Philosophy, verbatim: 

Empathy

We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.

Focus

In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.

Impute

People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc.; if we represent them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.

Part 1: Empathy

We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.

“It starts and ends with empathy,” Con Cirillo, director of lifecycle marketing at Funnel, told me during the 2022 Customer Engagement Insider online event, The Future of Customer Engagement. Cirillo’s far from alone. TBGA CEO Christine Alemany kicked off an October 2022 Harvard Business Review article proclaiming, “Empathy is the foundation of an effective marketing strategy.” 

So what is empathy? “Being able to truly understand another’s perspective,” Alemany says. And how do we understand another’s perspective? By truly listening — and prioritizing the customer’s needs over the sale. 

“Sometimes, people’s true preferences differ from their declared preferences because humans tend to answer questions based on idealized versions of themselves,” explains Alemany. “It is why someone might claim to be an avid NPR listener (stated preference) when they actually jam out to Britney Spears on their morning commutes (revealed preference).”

Thus, as I’ve suggested before, “make sure to balance so-called ‘anecdata’ (i.e., evidence based on stated personal preferences as opposed to real-world behavioral data) with data on actual decisions people make,” by not only hosting focus groups and conducting frequent and strategic customer surveys but also by leveraging:

• A/B testing tools — like Adobe Target, Google Optimize, Hubspot’s A/B Testing Kit, Omniconvert, Optimizely, Unbounce, or Zoho PageSense — to conduct usability tests to verify which features of your website drive the most conversions or keep users on the site the longest
• Head- and eye-tracking technology — like Eyegaze, eyeware, IRISBOND, Mirametrix, or Tobii — to determine which on-page elements catch users’ attention and stimulate actions
• Website user feedback tools — like Hotjar, Marker.io, Maze, or Userbrain — that provide actionable insights based on user behaviors
• Sentiment analysis tools — like Brand24, Lexalytics, OpenText Magellan Text Mining, Qualtrics Connect, or Talkwalker — to gauge user attitudes and emotions at all critical touchpoints

Then, make the necessary changes and test, monitor, analyze, iterate and optimize. Whether you’re working on your website (re)design, your content marketing strategy or your email drip campaigns, it’s unlikely you’ll nail it on your first attempt; plus, your efforts won’t produce the desired effect if you don’t temper your attempts at customer centricity with a full dose of authenticity. 

Consumers want to share values with the brands they shop and support — and can smell bullshit better than ever — which is why “being truly empathic [also] means being genuine.”

Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner/Black Lives Matter ad serves as an infamous example: “In the commercial,” writes Business News Daily, “Jenner notices a nearby protest amid her photoshoot. It’s unclear what the activists are marching for, but she joins them, takes a Pepsi from a cooler and approaches a police officer to hand them the can of soda. The officer takes a sip, someone snaps a photo and everyone cheers.” Needless to say, this tone-deaf TV spot was blasted by all corners and pulled only days after its costly debut.

Dove soap also screwed up. In 2017 in the UK, the Unilever brand sold body wash with limited-edition “real beauty bottle packaging,” designed to resemble various female body types in celebration of the many shapes and sizes of beauty. Unfortunately, though, “allowing customers to ‘choose’ a bottle that mirrors their body shape is the opposite of empowering. Suddenly, shower gel is as fraught with body-image dilemmas as their jeans purchase.”

As Guardian writer Laura Craik wrote at the time, Dove’s plan to “evoke the shapes, sizes, curves and edges that combine to make every woman their very own limited edition” might have “seemed compelling in an energetic brainstorming meeting, but that’s surely where it should have stayed.”

Indeed, no matter how hard you try (and even if your products are sold in 150 countries):

• You can’t hop on every marketing trend
• You need the right user and customer data to successfully predict what marketing messages will (and won’t) work
• You can’t be everything to everybody

“Authentic empathy begets authentic connections between brands and customers,” writes Alemany; on the other hand, so-called “emotional marketing” campaigns — launched at the wrong time, by the wrong brand and/or for the wrong reasons — “come across as insincere at best and manipulative at worst.” 

And this is why, way back in 1977, Apple realized it had to focus.

Part 2: Focus

In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.

No one would recommend spreading yourself too thin. It’s a cliche for a reason. And yet hundreds of brands have failed by focusing on doing more — and not better.

While Apple allowed other tech and gadget companies to develop apps and hardware for Apple devices — and innovated within its own space, shrinking its desktop computers, introducing high-powered, media-ready and lighter, streamlined laptops, “pioneer[ing] the mouse,” introducing the first “must-have” mp3 player (the iPod), revolutionizing the smartphone, and implementing an operating system that translates across devices — other companies lost focus, trying to do too much or appeal to too many. 

Facebook/Meta is a perfect example: After years of success running Facebook as a social media company, “Zuckerberg waxed poetic about the Metaverse as ‘a vision that spans many companies’ and ‘the successor to the mobile internet,’ but he failed to articulate the basic business problems that the Metaverse would address.” On May 8, 2023, Ed Zitron, an award-winning tech culture author and the CEO of EZPR, released an obituary for the metaverse, “the latest fad to join the tech graveyard,” only a year after Facebook changed its name to Meta, committing to becoming an entirely “metaverse company eventually.”

Ziltron continues: 

The concept of virtual worlds where users interact with each other using digital avatars is an old one, going back as far as the late 1990s with massively multiplayer online role-player games, such as "Meridian 59," "Ultima Online," and "EverQuest." And while the Metaverse supposedly built on these ideas with new technology, Zuckerberg's one actual product — the VR platform Horizon Worlds, which required the use of an incredibly clunky Oculus headset — failed to suggest anything approaching a road map or a genuine vision.

As a result, and despite all the media fanfare and glowing analyst projections, the metaverse flopped, taking Meta (partially) down with it. Despite spending more than $100 billion on metaverse research and development, Meta no longer even pitches the metaverse to potential advertisers. In its February 1, 2023, earnings report, the company reported a single-year $13.72-billion loss by Reality Labs, the company’s virtual reality division. Not surprising, considering even Meta employees refused to engage in the virtual world. 

Last year, CNBC host Jim Cramer “nodded approvingly” when Zuckerberg claimed one-billion people would use the metaverse, even though Zuckerberg couldn’t explain where users would spend their money (creating income for metaverse brands) or “why anyone would want to strap a clunky headset to their face to attend a low-quality cartoon concert.” 

I have to admit, even I wondered while covering the metaverse for Customer Engagement Insider whether I was alone in ‘not getting it.’ I wrote about it anyway, because everyone else seemed to. Turns out, I was wrong: they didn’t get it either.

“Every single business idea or rosy market projection was built on the vague promises of a single CEO. And when people were actually offered the opportunity to try it out, nobody actually used the Metaverse.” Decentraland, “the most well-funded, decentralized, crypto-based Metaverse product,” only had around 38 daily active users in its $1.3-billion ecosystem, as of late 2022. 

All the failed metaverse investments by the likes of Microsoft, Disney and Walmart “led to thousands — if not tens of thousands — of people losing their jobs.” And then Zuckerberg himself put the final nail in the coffin, declaring in March 2023 that Meta’s new “single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of our products.”

Let’s hope, at least for the sake of Facebook users and Meta employees and investors, Zuckerberg’s AI investments don’t fall flat too. 

In the end, the lesson is simple. As Zitron explains, “a functional business proposition requires a few things to thrive and grow: a clear use case, a target audience, and the willingness of customers to adopt the product.”

In other words, Meta failed in its mission by: 

• Losing focus on what it had always done best
• Refusing to listen to — and empathize with — its customers and prospects, investing everything in a product concept that wouldn’t appeal to its target audiences

Part 3: Impute

People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc.; if we represent them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.

Apple arguably has the best computers, operating system, smartphones and earbuds, but the brand has won the CMO Survey award for marketing excellence for 15 straight years not because it has “the best product, the highest quality, [or] the most useful software” but because it presents its high-quality products and software “in a creative, professional manner,” allowing its marketers to “impute the desired qualities” on Apple’s offerings.

So, how does Apple achieve this desired result? 

9 Ways Apple Keeps On Winning

Simple; by:

1. Identifying, listening to and empathizing with its target audiences
2. Focusing on the development of paradigm-shifting, high-end products and premium branding
3. Using streamlined, graphic-heavy product presentations
4. Conducting simple, targeted, needs-based and emotive product promotion
5. Creating mystery and intrigue around all new product launches and enhancements
6. Embracing the “cool factor” and high product valuations to increase profitability
7. Innovating in customer experience, from Apple Care and self-service portals to the in-store layout and Genius bar
8. Nurturing a community of loyalists
9. Relying heavily on product placements, a newer, increasingly effective digital strategy I detail in The Ultimate Guide to Digital Advertising

Will this nine-pronged approach work for you? Truthfully, probably. 

9 Requirements of a Winning Digital Marketing Strategy 

Of course, the only way to know for sure how you should impute value on your offerings is to develop, implement, test, monitor, analyze, report on, update and optimize your own digital marketing strategy that:

1. Focuses on your core values, value proposition, core offerings and uniqueness
2. Relies on zero- and first-party customer data
3. Demonstrates empathy with your audience(s), without sacrificing authenticity (or consistency)
4. Starts with content
5. Incorporates social media marketing, digital advertising and SEO to bring users to your site
6. Leverages user-centered design to optimize your lead generation
7. Leverages email marketing (and SMS marketing) to nurture your leads into customers — and, ideally, brand ambassadors and influencers
8. Incorporates customer experience best practices throughout the customer journey
9. Iterates based on ongoing customer and user actions and feedback

Empathizing, Focusing and Imputing: Get Started Today

Finding success taking cues from Apple’s 46-year-old marketing strategy is easier said than done. At Customer Engagement Insider, we specialize in developing and distributing content that helps brands target the right audiences, at the right time, the right way, in the right place. 

To learn more about how CEI can help you generate leads that convert, download our media kit >>>

Image Credits (in order of appearance) 

1. Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/MardkT836BU
2. Photo by Bangyu Wang on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/omoCm0bvNW4
3. Photo by Steve Leisher on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/YkPC-sZKil4
4. Photo by Paul Skorupskas on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/7KLa-xLbSXA
5. Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/KNfj7yDVMF0
6. Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/_XTY6lD8jgM