Steve Jobs was the Heisenberg of marketing.
Back in 2008, this gent launched a genius 40-second ad to promote his newborn baby, MacBook Air.
“I'm a new soul, I came to this strange world Hoping I could learn a bit about how to give and take” — is playing in the background.
A small envelope is sitting pretty on a desk, a human hand opens it, takes out a slim laptop, and opens it. The angles change and the logo appears. Just when the hand closes the laptop, it says “the world’s thinnest notebook”. And that’s a wrap.
This is how it actually goes, take 40 seconds to check it out.
Was this successful?
Usually, a successful ad results in a lot of sales and bills, that it did. Considering the fact that I am writing this story from a MacBook Air and your 6 friends out of 9 use this slick baby.
Heck let’s take it a step further. This ad was posted on 2008, 13 years later, you and I and genius marketing professors are still talking about it. Why?
Speaking of, Professor Jonah Berger, author of the best-selling book Contagious decoded this ad. This is what I learned.
Apple didn’t say we make very thin computers. They showed us comparing it to something we all know and understand — Making ideas stick
To make your messaging stick in the mind of your customer like chewing gum, you need to compare it with something they already know and understand.
By doing that, you give them a reference point. All the viewer has to do then is to compare what you are saying with the reference point and convince himself.
Let’s say you wanted to convince someone that California is really big. One way to do it would be.
You: hey Steve. Do you know that California is really big? It is home to somewhat 33 million people.
You could expect a somewhat unsurprised like
“Ok. That’s a lot of people”
Instead, if you said something like:
Do you know that California has more people than Alaska, Idaho, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, and 14 other states, combined?
Steve: “jaw-dropped, eyebrows raised” whew.
Now, Steve is not only convinced that California is one of the biggest states, he would also remember it for the next 19 years.
By comparing California to 22 other states(reference point) that he knows about, Steve would think that if California has more people than 22 other states, it must be really big. Similarly, by putting the Mac book inside a small office envelope (reference point), Steve Jobs consciously or subconsciously made you say:
“If this thing can fit inside an envelope, it must be really slim”
Now let’s assume that Steve Jobs used a different recipe to cook this ad. This is our go-to approach when convincing someone or our customers to buy from us. That is using stats.
If your goal is not just to be convincing when you’re in the room, but make sure people remember what you say when you leave the room, you need to make sure you’re getting credibility beyond just the statistics we’re using.
The stats are no doubt convincing but they aren’t much memorable. I was checking out video marketing stats, I found stats like “a big damn percentage” of marketers used video marketing in their campaigns.
Then, I found a HubSpot blog that started with something like,
“ In the last two hours, more video content has been uploaded online than produced by all major U.S T.v channels so far, combined”
You see what Hubspot did there? Ikr.
So what did we learn from this 13-year-old smart-ass ad?
To make people convince themselves and say “ it must be really good”, show how good it is by comparing or relating to something they all know and understand aka a reference point. You do that so their brains do the rest of convincing themselves.
If you want people to remember you even after you leave the room, go beyond statistics. Think about it, if instead of using an envelope, apple said something like our MacBook is 37% or something slimmer than an HP notebook, then would you and I will still be talking about it after 13 years?
Food for thought.
Peace.
