Marketing Guru » Marketing Champions

Marketing Champion – Steve Jobs

Marketing Guru — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 11:53:15 +0000

Not all the successful marketers have marketing degree and similarly not all the marketing graduates are successful in marketing. One of the best examples of the clan of successful marketers without marketing degree is Steve Jobs.

Steven Paul “Steve” Jobs (born February 24, 1955) is the co-founder and CEO of Apple Inc and a Silicon Valley icon. Jobs also founded NeXT Computer Company now part of Apple Inc. and served as CEO of Pixar Animation Studios now part of Walt Disney Company. As Philip Kotler rightly said, “Marketing’s work should not be so much about selling but about creating products that don’t need selling”, Steve Jobs has just did this time and again. Jobs captivated everyone including his rivals with his elegant line of products such as the Apple, iMac, iTunes, iPod, iPhone and the new iPad. He is habituated to revolutionize the market in whatever he is interested in.

In the late 1970s, Jobs, teamed with Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, Mike Markkula and others to design, develop, and market some of the first commercially successful lines of PCs including the Apple II series and Macintosh. In the early 1980s, Jobs was among the first to vision the market potential of the GUI. However, in 1985, Jobs resigned from Apple because of internal power struggle. He was not part of the Apple Inc. until he came back in 1997, and has been serving as its CEO since then. Jobs is also a Board of Director of Walt Disney Company.

Steve Jobs – a marketing genius

Made masses to feel and enjoy the digital technology
Steve Jobs envisioned that a software program can do wonders rather than just be dry codes and instructions in PCs. His creativity brought digital technology to the reach of a commoner and introduced new experiences that were only seen in the science fiction movies. As a marketing genius, he introduced elegant products that captured consumers’ imaginations that immediately smashed the existing products. As a perfectionist, he came up with unmatched improvement in the existing products that raised the bar for rivals.

Products that don’t need selling
Once Steve Jobs said, “It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” He has done just that four times. The first is the Apple II. It is the first PC to reach the classrooms and offices, which was till then seen mostly at advanced science and technology institutions operated by techies. His Pixar Animation redefined the cartoon movies till then which was popular mostly with kids. The ‘incredible’ animation starting with ‘Toy Story’ in 1995 made the animation as an important part of the Hollywood mainstream. Four of the six animation films nominated for Academy awards have won it. Thirdly, he stunned the music industry with iPod and iTunes online store. The combo laid the blueprint for the new generation music business in the Internet era. Finally, it’s the iPhone that revolutionized the smart-phone segment with its futuristic design and technology. Apple recently released tablet PC called iPad, which is set to stir the markets of tablet PC and net books.

Destructive innovation
Industry experts attribute the success of Apply to the job done by Steve Jobs who has no parallel in the technology innovation. Jobs is termed as a master marketer with more than 30 years of experience of creating stylish products with great design that works. Jobs lured Disney to takeover Pixar and made agreements with music companies and Hollywood studios to create the market for iTunes music store that already sold more than 8 billion songs online. Apple leads the industry in technology innovation also with Mac PCs and software. Apple is also leading the digital music revolution, by already selling more than 240 million iPods and entered the smart phone market introducing iPhone.

One should remember that none of the products’ idea or concept is completely invented by them. There is animation existing before Pixar, there were mp3 players before iPod and similar case with the other products. All the products and service ideas already existed in the market. Nevertheless, what Steve Jobs did is, visualizing the future of certain capable products and services in the next 5 to 6 years and introduce a completely new way of interaction with technology to the customers. It’ll be more appropriate if we call it destructive imagination or creativity rather than innovation.

Steve Jobs’ Best Quotes

It comes from saying no to 1,000 things to make sure we don’t get on the wrong track or try to do too much.
A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
To turn really interesting ideas and fledgling technologies into a company that can continue to innovate for years, it requires a lot of disciplines.
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.
It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.

Marketing Champion – Karsanbhai Patel

Marketing Guru — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 14:29:49 +0000

Karsanbhai Patel does not have a professional degree in marketing. He proved that a professional marketer does not need a formal degree in marketing to be successful.

Dr. Karsanbhai Khodidas Patel is the founder of the present Rs. 3550 crore Nirma group with main activities in detergents, soaps, cosmetics, and salt. If marketing is to find the gaps and fill them, Karsanbhai Patel just hit the bull’s-eye.

Karsanbhai Khodidas was born in 1945, in Ruppur village in north Gujarat in a family of farmers. He graduated in Chemistry at the age of 21. Initially, he worked as a lab technician and later served the state Government. In 1969 at the age of 24, Karsanbhai started manufacturing phosphate free detergent powder, Nirma (named after his daughter Nirupama) in his backyard. He dedicated after office hours for manufacturing Nirma and sold on his bicycle while going to his work place, which is 17km from his home. The handmade detergent packets were sold at Rs. 3 per kg, which was one-third of then least priced popular detergents.

Karsanbhai Established Nirma with Simple Yet Superior Marketing Strategy

Product Positioning
Karsanbhai found a massive market segment that was starving for a good-quality detergent at an affordable price. He Kept his margins very low, and was happy to get anything between three and five percent. Eventually, this strategy made him to discover the fortune from the volumes. Nirma was much cheaper than the existing multinational products like Surf and almost equally performing well. On the other hand, Nirma was far superior to that of the cheap washing soaps that were the only alternative to costly detergents until then. Thus, Nirma found its place between the expensive detergents and inferior washing soap slabs. The Nirma brand was quickly recognized in Gujarat and neighboring parts of Maharashtra and the rest is history.

Pricing
Nirma transformed the face of Indian detergent market by staging the strength of low-cost detergent powder segment. For hassled homemakers struggling to balance their monthly budgets, the product was a boon. At the time, detergent and soap markets were dominated by multinational corporations with products like Surf by Hindustan Lever (Indian arm of UniLever – a British-Dutch FMCG giant). They were priced above Rs. 13 per kg, which was out of the reach of the middle class homemakers. Seizing the opportunity, Nirma was priced at one-third of the leading detergents’ price that rapidly conquered the detergent market share. In less than ten years, Nirma became the top selling detergent in India.

Karsanbhai stayed focused on cost reduction strategies to cement the slot for Nirma in the market. Consequently, Nirma adopted backward integration strategy while introducing latest technology to its production facilities to offer a better product at a reasonable price.

Distribution
Karsanbhai knew the popular maxim – ‘the product should be available within an arm’s length of the desire’, but the local retailers did not support him initially. He had to recruit local housewives to sell his product which was innovative and very effective. Once he gained strength, he took a massive expansion of the width and depth of the distribution network. As a result, Nirma began sprouting everywhere in Gujarat, in little shops at the street corners, and even in the remotest villages. It took no time to catch wild fire of word of mouth publicity that gained the trust of the agents and distributors across the country. As a result, Nirma reached those uncharted markets that were alien to its predecessors. At present Nirma has 450 exclusive distributors and over 1 million retailers. The marketing strategy applied here is – Target disruptive products at non-consumers i.e. Nirma targeted non-users of Surf thus avoided the attention of HLL and later grew rapidly and was unstoppable once it is in the right mode.

Challenging established multinationals needs extreme courage and to win in the long run needs marketing foresight. Karsanbhai Khodidas Patel, once a government servant with the knowledge and experience as a chemist offered a good product and was aggressive in marketing strategy. He made the multinationals to follow Nirma and introduce substitutes such as Wheel. In this respect, the Nirma case can be compared to those of Ford, Apple, Sony, and Honda, all one-of-a-kind entrepreneurs who built their empire on gut feeling rather than following the classical patterns taught in business schools. This is a genuine road from rags-to-riches one would like to follow. The story of Nirma has become a classic marketing case study.