Design Like Apple: Seven Principles For Creating Insanely Great Products, Services, and Experiences

The Product Is the Marketing

Great products sell themselves.

Back in 1972, brand recognition was all you needed to sell a product. Major companies like consumer-goods manufacturers could easily correlate their advertising and television media buying budgets with sales figures. For a laundry detergent manufacturer, the performance of the detergent and its chemical formulation were less important than the brand name that a customer recognized. Procter & Gamble, for example, introduced Tide laundry detergent in 1946, backed by a $21 million ad campaign that made it the top selling brand in the country within two years, which continued well into the twenty-first century.

Technology has upended this strategy. Television advertising has declined with the arrival of VCRs, TiVo, YouTube, Hulu, OnDemand, Netflix, and whatever is coming next that lets the customer decide which ads to watch—or perhaps to blithely ignore your ads altogether. The Internet and social media are the new conduits for information, and that has led to a sea change in the way people perceive products and make judgments about them. In the 1970s, you might have been swayed by ads for a painkiller such as Excedrin (each type of headache had a specific number, such as “Excedrin headache number 10” for a “screaming child”), but today you hear a million voices on websites and through social media trumpeting the benefits ...