Its a pretty safe assumption that if youre reading this blog, youve seen The Matrix. And you may or may not remember the scene where a kid explains to Neo that the trick to bending a spoon with your mind is simply to remember that, There is no spoon.
So it is with marketing. One thing I learned very early in life, thanks to intentional overuse of psychedelic drugs, is that there is no reality. As a guy at the commune once put it: The reality is, there is no reality.
So some guy says his iPhone 4 is having reception issues. I say there is no reception issue. Now its his reality against my reality. Which one of us is living in the real reality?
Theres a two-part answer: 1, there is no real reality, and 2, it doesnt matter.
The only thing that matters is which reality our customers will choose to adopt as their own.
Of course most people would rather live in a reality where everything works and there are no problems. And now, thanks to me, that reality exists. Because Ive created that reality for them.
Probably the biggest thing Ive taught the team at Apple is that people never know what theyre supposed to think about anything. This is true in Hollywood, in the book business, in the art world, in politics. And especially in technology.
So we put out a new phone and everyone is sitting there wondering what they should think about it. What I realized many years ago and honestly, it still amazes me is that most people are so unsure of themselves that they will think whatever we tell them to think.
So we tell people that this new phone is not just an incremental upgrade, but rather is the biggest breakthrough since the original iPhone in 2007. We say its incredible, amazing, awesome, mind-blowing, overwhelming, magical, revolutionary. We use these words over and over.
Its all patently ridiculous, of course. But people believe it.
We demo FaceTime, and we say that nobody in the world has ever seen anything like this before. Jonny and I act stunned and gob-smacked, as if we ourselves still cant believe that weve just invented video chat.
Again, this is utterly untrue, a total and absolute lie. But people accept it. They hoot and cheer for us.
The other strategy we use comes from Zen Buddhism. You ever study Zen koans? Most of them make no sense at all. You read them and you go away feeling confused and stupid.
We do something similar. We call it clouding. Right now, for example, weve sent out the following messages about iPhone 4 and the antenna issues:
1. All mobile phones have this problem.
2. Our mobile phone does not have this problem.
You see how this works? These two statements cannot both be true.
Yet weve said both of them. And now you dont know what to believe.
Ask any psychologist what happens to people when they get confused. Their heart rate goes up. Their skin temperature rises. Adrenaline starts to flow.
They feel desperate, and scared, as if theyve fallen out of a boat and now theyre getting tossed by waves and theyre maybe going to drown.
Now all you have to do is reach out with some kind of certainty, and no matter how obviously untrue it might be, people will latch onto it.
Every religion in the world knows this, from the Catholics to the Scientologists. Its the oldest trick in the book. You create some uncertainty, you put people at risk you tell them theyre going to hell, or whatever and then you hold out the answer.
No matter how ridiculous your answer may be like, the one about the galactic ruler Xenu, or the one where God turns into a bird and flies down to earth and impregnates a virgin people will accept it.
Not only that, theyll actually thank you for feeding them this horseshit. Because any certainty, no matter how crazy, is better than uncertainty.
Which brings me back to iPhone 4 and the antenna issue. Right now youre confused. Youre worried. You dont know what to believe. You just wish someone would come along and tell you that everything is squared away and theres nothing to worry about.
Well, stay tuned for that. And remember: There is no spoon.