The news that Steven P. Jobs would step down as chief executive of Apple has generated an outpouring of comments from senior managers of agencies about his decades at the helm of the company as well as what might come next there.
“I wish him well as the future he created unfolds and flourishes around us,” John Nosta, chief creative officer at Ogilvy CommonHealth Worldwide in New York, wrote in a blog post. Nosta riffed on “chief executive officer” to call Jobs a “cool executive original” who always provided a “crazy eclectic opinion.”
Nosta described Jobs’s approach thus: “Make art, create and innovate, listen to your instincts (and your customer), embrace aesthetics and the dollars will flow.”
Jobs’s departure “leaves a void in the largest tech brand on the planet,” Raqib Sheikh, a senior strategic planner at Modea in Blacksburg, Va., wrote in an e-mail. “This is the realization of most Apple fan-boys’ biggest fear,” he added.
Sheikh defined the challenge this way: “Will Apple be able to move from the Cult of Personality era into the Legendary Company era that it’s on the verge of reaching?” “One can’t help but think that’s what Steve would’ve wanted as his legacy,” he added.
Sharon Love, chief executive at TPN, praised Jobs as someone who revolutionized retail. “His Apple stores are a destination for consumer interactivity and information,” she said. Each Apple store is “a brand experience hub with no equal,” Love said, “filled with people who are excited to be there, enjoying themselves and loving the products.”
Perhaps more importantly, she added, Jobs “put instantly accessible portable retail in every person’s hand with the iPhone.” “Whether you now carry Apple’s smartphone or another brand,” Love said, “there’s no question that Jobs’s vision has changed the way the world shops.”
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Adam Hanft, chief executive at Hanft Projects in New York, lauded Jobs’s “refusal to submit advertising (or product) to the indignity of the focus group.”As a result, Hanft wrote in an e-mail, Apple “has been the brand that is brought up thousands of times a day in creative meetings between agencies and clients as the icon of creative purity and integrity.”
Another fact about Jobs that struck Hanft as particularly interesting is his allegiance to traditional media for Apple’s ad campaigns.Apple executives “don’t do gimmicky stuff,” he said, but rather rely on media like television, print and outdoor.
Robert S. Scalea, chief executive at Brand Union, a brand strategy and design consultancy, said he believed that “the equity of the Apple brand” built up during Jobs’s tenure would be “sufficiently strong” in the short term.
“The real question is the long term,” Scalea wrote in an e-mail. “The equity that both the Apple and Steve Jobs brands share is the attribute of being visionary, which strongly associated with the company’s cachet.”
“Peter Walshe, a global director at Millward Brown who oversees its annual BrandZ report on brand value, said he believed that Jobs has “left the Apple brand in great health” and as a result is company is “still poised for future growth.”
Apple finished first on the list of top 100 most valuable global brands in the 2011 BrandZ report from Millward Brown. In the report, Walshe recalled, consumers described Apple as a brand that is uniquely “creative,” “fun” and “adventurous.”
Research by Millward Brown on Apple’s brand equity found that consumers perceived it as more of a luxury brand than a technology brand, Walshe said, “commanding huge desire and an equally high price premium.”
@ The New York Times