Apple CEO Steve Jobs is the world’s greatest corporate storyteller. His techniques, sharpened over the years, can be used by PR professionals to pitch their clients or win new business. Here are seven rules Jobs follows to dazzle an audience—they can be easily applied in the PR sphere.
â–¶ Stick to the rule of three. The human mind can only retain three or four chunks of information in short-term memory. When Steve Jobs introduces a new product, he typically highlights three things about the product. Nearly every presentation is divided into three parts. On Sept. 9, 2009, when Jobs returned to the stage after an extended health-related absence, he outlined his presentation into three areas: iPhone, iTunes and iPod. Jobs has even been known to have fun with the principle of three. At Macworld 2007, he introduced “three revolutionary products”: a new iPod, a phone and an Internet communicator. After repeating the three products several times, he disclosed the big announcement—all three would be wrapped up in one, the iPhone. Ask yourself, what are the three things I want my audience to know?
â–¶ Deliver a “holy smokes” moment. Every Jobs presentation has one moment that leaves everyone in awe—the watercooler moment. These moments are scripted ahead of time to complement his slides, the Apple Web site, press releases and advertisements. In 2008, Jobs pulled the MacBook Air out of a manila, inter-office envelope to show everyone just how thin the notebook was. Bloggers went nuts and it was the most popular photograph of the event. Just as a great novel doesn’t reveal the whole story on the first page, a great presentation should build up to the key moment. The holy smokes moment might be a demonstration. It’s the one part of the presentation when everyone thinks, “I want to be a part of this story.”
â–¶ Introduce heroes and villains. Every great drama has a hero and a villain, and so does a Jobs presentation. We see this technique as far back at 1984 when Apple first introduced the Macintosh. Jobs set up the product launch by painting a picture of IBM —“Big Blue”—bent on “world domination.” Apple, he said, would be the only company to stand in its way. The audience cheered in wild approval. Great presentations have an antagonist—a common enemy—so the audience can rally around the hero. The hero is you, your brand or your product. One caveat—a villain need not be a competitor, but a problem in need of a solution.
â–¶ Think visually. Apple presentations are strikingly simple and visual. For example, there are no bullet points on a Jobs slide. There are words, of course, but words that are most often accompanied by images and photographs. This is what psychologists call “picture superiority.” It simply means that ideas are more easily processed when presented in text and images than in text alone. When there are words on a Jobs slide, there are very few. The average PowerPoint slide has 40 words. It’s difficult to find 40 words on 10 slides in a Jobs presentation.
â–¶ Create Twitter-friendly headlines. Apple makes it simple for the media to talk about their products—the company writes the headlines for them. Now, reporters will tell you that they like to come up with their own headlines, but why then did hundreds of them use “world’s thinnest notebook” to describe the MacBook Air? Because that’s how Jobs coined it. Jobs describes every new product with a concise phrase that fits well within a 140-character Twitter post. If you can’t describe what you do in a simple sentence, go back to the drawing board.
â–¶ Practice like crazy. Jobs makes a presentation look effortless, but that polish comes after hours of grueling practice. Jobs will rehearse for many, many hours over many weeks to get every aspect of a presentation just right. Every slide is written like a piece of poetry and every presentation is treated like a theatrical experience. If you don’t practice your presentation ahead of time, don’t blame anyone but yourself if it doesn’t come off as smoothly as you had hoped.
â–¶ Sell dreams, not products. Anyone can learn the specific techniques he uses to create visually creative slides, but those slides will fall flat if delivered without passion and enthusiasm. When Jobs introduced the iPod in 2001, he said that music was a transformative experience and that in its own small way, Apple was changing the world. Where most observers saw a music player, Jobs saw an opportunity to create a better world for his customers. PRN
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This article was written by Carmine Gallo, author of The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience (McGraw-Hill). He can be reached at [email protected].