Few brands make the transition from being about a product or service to being about an experience. Those that do manage to create a cult. The true measure of Steve Jobs' worth to Apple and the technology and content businesses is that he helped the company he founded do just that.
The seeds of this cult were sown when the company aired its famous 1984 commercial during that year's Superbowl, the only time it was aired. It flourished through the 1980s and early 1990s, feeding both off and into the counterculture movement, and on the back of some excellent advertising. Among the last was what remains my favourite advertising tagline: bicycles for the mind. The story goes that Jobs was looking up the muscular efficiency of various species and found that humans came in pretty much at the bottom.
But a human being on a bicycle came almost on top of the list.
As is always the case, yesterday's counterculture becomes today's culture (and the people at the vanguard of the former become the purveyors of the latter). This probably explains the creator's bias that's so evident when it comes to apps. Every mainstream media entity has an iPad app; not many have Android apps--at least not yet. I have no idea whether this will last, but it's something that gives the iPad a distinct edge, even if it is only a temporary one.
If Apple's advertising and almost eerily-perfect understanding of how people interact with devices helped sustain the cult, then its ability to achieve the ultimate objective of every hardware and software maker helped its business thrive. This is, quite simply, all about taking a piece of the pie. Every time you hear an Indian IT services company talk about being paid on the basis of the impact of a project it did for a customer, every time a software products company talks about a per-user licence, this is what they are doing--taking a piece of the pie. Through its iTunes store, Apple managed to do this for a lot of audio and video content people consume, including music and TV shows. Now, through its subscription model for magazines and newspapers on the App store, it is doing the same for such content as well.
Amazon is probably the only other technology company that has managed to do this, with its Kindle store (this and its early entry into the Cloud business, gives me reason to believe that the company's own tablet, when it launches will prove a more worthy competitor to Apple's iPad).
Clearly, Jobs wasn't just good with products.
Can the company continue to do this, now that he has quit as CEO?
It could but the problem with cults is that they are almost always built around personalities. The cult Apple has managed to create doesn't revolve around the iPhone or the iPad or the App store or the iTunes store.
It revolves around Steve Jobs just like, closer home, the cult Anna Hazare has created has now become more about him and his fast rather than the cause for which he is protesting.
With Jobs gone, every new Apple product faces an additional challenge --addressing doubts in the minds of consumers whether it would have been better had Jobs been involved (let's simply call this the Jobs test).
I have always felt Jobs' style of functioning--almost autocratic, intuitive, hands-on --is more Indian than American. It is unfortunate that, over the years and, especially over the past two decades, Indian entrepreneurs have ignored their inner voices in favour of scientific management. Systems and processes can ensure that a company is well run (and that everyone marks attendance).
Research can help a company understand consumer behaviour. But none of this can ensure that the company will come up with the big ideas that matter to customers.
As Jobs rides into the sunset, Indian entrepreneurs would do well to ponder this (even as some of them continue to rip off the business models of pioneering foreign technology firms and launching local variants). And they'd do well to do some mental cycling.
