Perhaps “innovator” is most appropriate to summarize Steve Jobs. But for proper homage, a new word should be added to our vernacular, highlighting Steve Jobs’ genius of communicating his innovations—he leveraged rich understanding of marketing, type and typefaces, images and movies, letters and words: the 1984 Ad, Apple II, NeXT, iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, Think Different (sans ‘ly’) to name a few.
How about “Jobsian Marketing”?
After all, his legacy is the very act of creation paired with exceptional marketing build up, excitement of rumors and secretive roll-outs which turned millions into disciples. We, the ambassadors, spread the gospel, hoping to convert the meek, evangelizing the culture of Steve Job’s innovations and in turn become the strongest marketing arm any corporation could hope for.
Perhaps the pinnacle accomplishment for an inventor is to revolutionize the industry of their invention. Steve Jobs revolutionized several industries, enabling and accelerating the analogue > digital shifts of the early 21st century. His love of both process and product turned us on, tuned us in and made us believe.
Steve Job created a true new world order, where a single person can successfully manage their global business from the palm of their hand; created a film studio that disseminates genuine storytelling in an industry easily labeled as tired and uninspired; created a brand new market to support a once unknown product now casually known as the Tablet; created convenient media consumption, changing our expectations for how, when and where we are able to enjoy our books, music, films and video games.
Embedded in his great creations, Steve Jobs delivered great simplicity. His genius can be further seen by pushing Apple to be the first to remove the floppy disc drive from home PCs in the 1990s, or shipping units that had no dial-up modems when high speed internet was not yet available everywhere, or most recently shipping a line of laptops without a CD/DVD-ROM drive, coaxing people to depend on USB and WIFI.
Above all, Steve Job’s passion for his family, work and play immortalizes him as one of the world’s modern great thinkers, doers and innovators. He brought us the future before it was due.
Where do we go from here? Mimicry may be a form of flattery, but Steve Jobs would be disappointed with a legion of copy-cats. It is all of our time to continue pushing the boundaries of innovation, creation and marketing.
Thank you for setting the bar Steve Jobs.
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