How Steve Jobs perfected the pitch for the iPhone

November 14, 2023

Steve Jobs broke a key marketing rule when he introduced the first iPhone in 2007. As iPhone and iPod co-creator Tony Fadell puts it in the clip below:

“When he comes out on stage, he does something that every marketer is told not to do: say ‘these three things are now combined in one.’ They say that is the laziest form of storytelling possible for marketing.”

But what gave him the confidence to break this rule was the fact that he was constantly iterating on the story for the iPhone since they started building it:

“He was working on that story from Day 1. He was pitching us this, this, this. And then he would look at our faces because most people wouldn’t tell him what they really thought… And when he would see [confusion] he would modulate and change it slightly. He was working the entire time [we developed the product] on the story and the storytelling.”

And through this process he realized that the ”all-in-one” pitch turned out to be the best because it really identified the core pains people faced at the time:

“I want my iPod, but I want my communications, and I want my Internet browsing on the go so I can look up things. And when you were on the road, you had a laptop, an iPod, and a phone—you had to carry all of these things with you at once. Now we’re going to solve that pain for you and put it all together. He was just showing you the pain, imbuing that virus of doubt and going: ‘it’s now in this one magical thing.’”

Tony continues:

“And he could come up and masterfully tell that story because he told it almost every day to all of these people… it was like a Tony award-winning play that had been worked on for 10 years.”