Four (or Five!) Reasons Why

….Steve Jobs is a Marketing Genius

1. He has mastered the art of brand extension. You start with a single hit product, the iPod, and then attack the market by creating a never-ending series of variations.

2. He’s not afraid of cannibalization. Sure, the new iPod Touch will eat into sales of the iPhone given the fact the Touch is an “iPhone without the Phone”. But by launching the Touch before any of Apple’s competitors, Jobs has outflanked the competition…again.

3. He drops the price on the iPhone by $200 just two months after it hit the market, which causes an uproar from consumers who had already bought an iPhone. Then, Jobs recovers by quickly offering them a $100 credit to buy other Apple products.

4. He’s a Master of Media Manipulation. Jobs could have introduced a new iPod toothbrush, and the media would have eaten it up and hailed it as a marketing coup. These days, Apple can do no wrong as far as the media’s concerned.

5. He’s performed a miracle by transforming Apple into the belle of the ball, which is a huge contrast to just a few years ago when Apple was a struggling computer maker with marginal market share and uncertain prospects. Things were so desperate in Apple Land, the company even accepted a $150-million investment from Microsoft in 1997.

For more, check out Robert Cringely, who describes Jobs as the “Puppet Master”. Hypocritical, which explains the marketing theory behind the iPhone credit, while Menoj Mehta suggests that “Steve Jobs has a wonderful way of making the world think each ‘new’ Apple product is somehow a first or one-of-a-kind, but most aren’t any longer when it comes to the iPod line (save the iPhone, which is easily a revolutionary product).”