How Steve Jobs and Elon Musk Marketed Their Products at Zero Cost
As the Holy Scriptures put it, there is nothing new under the sun. Today’s new is practically yesterday’s old, done fashionably. Marketing trends that worked decades ago have been remodelled to work even better as the old ways have become archaic. However, the latest revelations from the Telsa Cybertruck Event say the old ways aren’t so old after all.
Calling out the competition
In 2007, Steve jobs stepped on a stage and challenged the most prominent phone manufacturers and basically told the world how crappy and outdated they all were. This included big brands such as Nokia, Motorola, Blackberry, and Palm Treo who were the ruling phone manufacturers at the time.
Note that this was even before the iPhone was launched. All Steve had then was a prototype that didn’t work perfectly, an intriguing aspect of Steve’s stage presentation that many do not know to date.
Apparently, when Steve climbed on stage in January 2007, there was no working prototype of the first iPhone. Instead, he had several iPhones with him on stage, which could only perform one feature correctly. This means one phone could display the camera feature correctly, another showcases map, another gallery, and so on. If you had watched the video, you most likely did not notice this very crucial detail.
Employees at Apple later stated how nervous the stunt made them feel. However, the point was that Steve was not afraid of the flaw of his prototype; he was focused on the futuristic value it had to offer that his competitions did not. Steve was a person to admit his mistakes and move on as fast as possible, a quality Elon Musk recently just displayed.
During the Telsa Cybertruck durability test, the Telsa Truck door was hit with a sledgehammer and it did nothing to it. However, when a steel ball was thrown at the bulletproof windscreen, it broke. This failure was as a result of the earlier impact of the sledgehammer according to Elon Musk himself, but it was a failure never the less.
Elon Musk who didn’t look surprised had moved swiftly to ask for a second trial. There was a buzz on the internet about the Telsa’s failure but this disaster only made the media even more interested in the Telsa.
Like Steve, Elon Musk had designed the Telsa Cybertruck to look into the future and not just provide a bulletproof windscreen. He furthermore talked at length about his competition as well as showed a video where the Cybertruck was compared to the Ford F150.
Turns out calling out the competition and selling out futuristic designs with a not-so functional prototype, a marketing technique used by Steve over 12 years ago still works out fine today. So, although not perfect, it is successful marketing.
Using Social Proof
After the iPhone was launched, the many who Steve had sold on the idea of the iPhone had queued up on getting their hands on the latest futuristic tech. The buzz it resulted in did an even better job telling the rest of the world what the word iPhone meant.
Elon Musk has also created a virtual social media queue for the Telsa Cybertruck. At the end of his presentation, a webpage was added to the Telsa website where people could pay for the right to buy the Telsa Cybertruck for a token of $100. On placing an order, a confirmation mail is sent with the picture of the Telsa as a thank you confirmation page.
Posting pictures of this confirmation on social media became a growing trend. In just two days, over 185,000 orders were recorded to have been made. This number rose to over 2.5 million orders merely days later.
Now, this was probably done by a majority of people who didn’t understand what they were paying for nor would order for the actual Cybertruck when it is officially launched, but those chasing social media claps. However, as a result, they have given Telsa more reach.
From meme’s generated from Telsa’s failure and people seeking social media claps, Musk used a tactic preceded by Steve to market the Telsa at 0 costs. Makes one wonder if the words “There is no such thing as bad publicity” is factually correct.
The funniest thing, though, is that Telsa is making Millions from a booking fee of $100 at no cost to themselves. Do the math, 2.4 million x 100 =
No wonder the Telsa Cybertruck event is tagged as one of the most successful events ever.
