On October 23rd, 2001, Steve Jobs stepped out onto a small stage at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters and dug into his jeans pocket. Every other MP3 player on the market boasted gigabytes and megabytes of storage capacity. Big numbers that meant nothing to anyone. Jobs had a different number pulled out.
“One thousand songs in your pocket.”
Four words. The iPod’s hard drive was 5GB. Jobs knew people wouldn’t understand gigabytes. One thousand songs painted a picture people could see, feel, and desire. Apple went on to sell over 400 million iPods after launching the product in 2001, according to Apple’s sales records. It was not the hardware that outcompeted the competition, though it was certainly competitive. It was that sentence.
Jobs landed on “1,000 songs in your pocket” before they had even settled on a product name, according to reporting from Vivid Method into Apple’s internal product development process. The marketing came first. The name came later, whittled down from a shortlist of ten options. The story was central. Build revolves around it.
Why We Understand Stories and Data Differently
Data points stick to the regions of the brain associated with language processing. “5 gigabytes of storage” launches the speech centers of your brain into action. Your brain decodes the words and registers their meaning before swiftly returning to whatever it was doing previously. Stories are different. Imagery and verbs fire the sensory regions of the brain that are active when you’re actually experiencing things. When you hear “a thousand songs in your pocket,” you run a quick playback: walking somewhere, slipping on the headphones, picking a song. You’ve experienced the product. Just … briefly, in your mind.
Chip and Dan Heath showcased this divide in their book Made to Stick (2007). Researchers had students give one-minute speeches to an audience. Every speech used an average of 2.5 stats. Ten minutes after hearing these speeches, participants struggled to recall any singular statistic whatsoever — but 63% could recount the stories. Same audience. Same room. Same amount of time passed between speech and interview. Stories outlasted the numbers surrounding them by a factor of twelve.
Marketing your product by spec-first means your audience will leave remembering the story they’d heard about your product, not the specs your product actually has.
Translating Feature Into Feeling
“When you carry your iPhone in your pocket,” Steve Jobs starts in his keynote, “you can’t fit your entire music library?” Jobs’ line works because he doesn’t lead with the phone. He leads with a person’s entire music library, and uses that as a jumping-off point to illustrate how life-changing the iPhone is:
“But with iPod and iTunes, that entire library can fit in your pocket.”
He translated what may as well have been binary code (“5 gigabytes of storage”) into an experience (“fit your entire music library in your pocket”). That translation is the story.
Your product has this translation. It just hasn’t uncovered it yet. A gym that advertises “state-of-the-art equipment” has not found its story. A gym that helps “achieve the version of yourself you’ve been putting off” has. Tax software that “offers automated reconciliation” hasn’t found its story. Tax software that “give’s you two extra hours back every Friday” has.
The thing your product does is never the story. The story is what your customer’s life looks like with that thing they need incorporated into it.
Think of the most well-told stories you know. They all follow the same framework: someone is in one type of life, something changes, they are in an unrecognizably better life on the other side. Structured that way, your customer is always the hero of the story. The product simply enables them to overcome the central conflict.
You know a story has lost its audience when it centers something other than a person. Because when you’re selling something other than a person, your customers cannot see themselves in your story.
Finding yours is easy. What does someone’s day look like the morning after they start using this product? How has their life changed? What can they do that was harder before? What did they gain. What did they lose. What is easier.
How does it feel?
The answers to those questions told plainly in terms the customer uses to describe their life is the story. Your product specs are the footnotes.
Jobs didn’t say Apple had developed a 5GB music player that uses FireWire connectivity and syncs effortlessly with iTunes. He said you could keep your entire music library in your pocket. Both of those sentences could describe the same device. Only one of them sold 400 million copies.
The specs were always sitting there. You just have to find the story that makes them matter.
