What Happens When Marketing Overtakes Innovation?
What happens is like with John Scully. John came from PepsiCo. They at most would change their product, you know, once every 10 years. I mean, to them, a new product was like a new size bottle, right? So if you were a product person, you couldn’t change the course of that company very much. So who influenced the success of PepsiCo? The sales and marketing people. Therefore, they were the ones that got promoted, and therefore, they were the ones that ran the company. For PepsiCo, that might have been okay, but it turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies.
If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or a better computer—so what? When you have a monopoly market share, the company’s not any more successful. So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of decision-making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product versus a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers. And so they just grab defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry.
Xerox could have owned the entire computer industry today. Could have been, you know, a company 10 times its size. Could have been IBM. Could have been the IBM of the ’90s. Could have been the Microsoft of the ’90s.
What Separates Apple from Those Earlier Monopolies?
Colorful marketing images. Playful graphic design for the event intros. A creative headquarters. Retail presence with lots of trees and glass. All of the differences we find between the monopolies of the computer revolution and Apple today mostly stem down to how they’re marketed. They all come down to how great Apple is at animating their next product.
That’s why so many people struggle to find functionality and utility within the latest hype train at Apple. Their intelligence feature? No. The primary reason so many of us wanted Apple Intelligence on our devices was for the animation. It was not for the features themselves—it was so that we could see the screen dance with its pixels and dazzling colors. These are not the idea of the software engineers. This is marketing. This is salespeople that know how to sell us sugared water year after year after year.
While Apple isn’t necessarily in the beverage game, they’re definitely in the same predicament we’ve seen previous monopolies fall into. How do we make these products interesting? How do we convince people to go out and keep buying them when there’s next to no difference anymore with the product? While Pepsi was dependent on the sweetness of sugar and fructose corn syrup, Apple is dependent on colorful, bedazzling marketing.
That’s why you’ll see the media and content creators lean in to unboxing every new iPhone color they can possibly get. Yet Apple knows in the end that the vast majority of people are buying the same basic colors: black, white, space gray. But the reason they keep offering those different color options year after year is not because they necessarily sell all that well. Most people cover them up with a case. But it all comes down to the marketing. It all comes down to convincing people that the next generation is the greatest one they’ve ever made.
Steve Jobs Saw This Coming
I believe Steve Jobs saw this coming, and he could see what happens when a company achieves such incredible victory year after year. It’s not sustainable. It doesn’t last forever. No matter how much we may love these brands, they all come to the same fate of monopoly. And when that day comes, it no longer matters how great your product can be. All that matters is how well you are at selling it. And when the marketing people and the salespeople start running the company, the innovations and the advancements in the product itself all start to fall apart.
So, in the words of Bane from The Dark Knight Rises, “Peace has cost you your strength. Victory has defeated you.”
When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success, and a lot of them think, well, somehow there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created. So they start to try to institutionalize process across the company, and before very long, people get very confused that the process is the content. That’s ultimately the downfall of IBM. IBM has the best process people in the world. They just forgot about the content. And that’s what happened a little bit at Apple too.
Where Do We Go from Here?
As we’re now seeing this inevitable stagnation of the tech community plateauing, it only leads me to believe that innovation hasn’t stopped—it’s really just moved elsewhere. In the end, I’m ultimately just grateful that I did not brand this channel purely around Apple. Thankfully, we called it Talos of Tech in the end, which means now might be the time to start pivoting.
And I think there’s a lot of fascinating developments going on out there in the tech industry, but I encourage viewers as we move into the next phase of this channel to keep an open mind and try to remember what technology really makes a difference and really makes an impact in our day-to-day lives and what things we can look forward to in the future.
I’m not going to stop talking about Apple—you don’t have to all freak out—but the frequency of uploads about Apple might not be as much as it used to be. And I only think this is a natural progression. If I’m going to keep this channel focused on honesty and integrity rather than hype up every announcement as if it’s the next big thing whenever Apple does something, I’d rather move towards what I think is the next Apple, in a sense, and what technology will look like in our world and which technology is on the horizon and in the not-too-distant future.
I want to highlight why you should care about any of this stuff in the first place—or at least why I am fascinated in the tech field as a whole and why I’m not stopping, why this channel is not dying. And that change, in the end, is really the only constant. And because us human beings are so easily complacent creatures, that should give us peace knowing that we don’t know what the future has in store.
