Steve Jobs' Defining Marketing Principle

No one can argue with the success of Apple and the genius of Steve Jobs in driving the company to that success. Much has been written about Steve Jobs' vision, genius, intuition, etc. and at least as much has been written about his prowess as a marketer. One of the defining principles, by most accounts anyway, in the marketing mind of Mr. Jobs was that as a marketer you drove the destiny of the brand. You don't leave the decision making to the customer, who may or may not know what they really want.

Like Henry Ford before him, Steve Jobs understood what it truly meant to position a brand; to define what the brand was going to deliver, and to tell the customer what they should expect from it. The marketing world is filled with products that have failed because they tried to deliver what the customer "thought" they wanted. 

As marketers we need to be bold, be visionary, and see our products for what they can deliver and then tell our customers what they need. Of course there is a risk to following this path, but the risk of trying to follow the direction of an uninformed and visionless consumer is far higher. After all, does anyone think that is Henry Ford or Steve Jobs asked customers to give them direction we would have the automobile, the Mac, or the iPad?