Steve Jobs and the mechanism of first choice

There is a scene in the film about Steve Jobs that keeps coming back to me, even after watching it countless times. Jobs is in a meeting, the Mac is still a project on the table, and he insists on including a detail that, at the time, seems insignificant. A font, a feature: an element that to the engineers looks almost like a whim; a demand for perfection that delays delivery and inflates the budget. Yet, from that moment in that scene, everything imaginable has been written. It has been told as obsession, as a narcissism of detail: the fixation of an insufferable visionary. But in that room, at that moment, Steve Jobs was not simply asking for perfection. He was building a mental infrastructure.

Today, when we think about buying a phone, in the vast majority of cases we think of an iPhone. We do not really compare it with the others, nor do we assess it with the clarity of a comparative analysis. We choose it before we choose it. It is a shortcut our brain takes in milliseconds, and not by chance. It happens because someone spent years installing that shortcut in our heads. And that someone, twenty years before neuromarketing had a recognised name, was Steve Jobs.

Only fifty years later would what happens in our minds when we think “Apple” before any other alternative find an explanation in the scientific literature. In 2011 Daniel Kahneman would describe it as a decision made by System 1: the automatic, fast, intuitive part of our thinking; the part that seeks no confirmation and bypasses rational deliberation. In 2010 Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute would speak of mental availability, meaning the ease with which a brand comes to mind when a specific buying situation is triggered.

All this shows that the font was much more than a detail: it was a synapse.

Every time Jobs dwelt on a seemingly marginal element (the curve of a corner, the weight of the packaging cardboard, the sound a laptop makes when you open it), he was in fact building what we now call “distinctive brand assets”: sensory markers that, once settled in the consumer’s brain, become preferential routes to the brand. Jobs had therefore grasped something that consumer behaviour research would formalise only decades later: the brain does not choose between options. The brain retrieves the first option it can recall with the least effort. And that first option almost always wins.

There is a second moment in that film that has stayed with me. Jobs has not yet returned to Apple. He meets a designer and starts looking through his drafts, the pencil sketches of what are, to all intents and purposes, still rough prototypes. Jobs looks at them as if they were the future. He then urges him to create: to think as a consumer even before thinking as an engineer. It was the mid-1990s. There were no analytics dashboards, conversion funnels or customer journeys. Precisely for this reason, what Jobs was doing in that conversation was an act of commercial revolution. He was bringing the consumer into the room, before the consumer knew they were part of the project.

And this is where the Jobs story meets a topic that is burning hot in the corridors of today’s major multinationals. The board, the C-suite and the board of directors need objective data. They need to bring concrete numbers, and that is legitimate, and right too. But in this optimisation of the measurable, something enormous slips into the background. Brand value, brand equity, consistency of image across touchpoints, the mental position the brand holds in the target audience, how consumers perceive us compared with our competitors. These are all variables that cannot be compressed into a percentage, and so they are treated as secondary. Yet they are exactly the variables Steve Jobs placed at the centre of every decision, at a time when no one could have faulted him for missing data, since the data did not yet exist.

For all these reasons, I believe the greatest lesson Steve Jobs left us is not to be found in his perseverance, his obsessiveness or his pursuit of perfection. Those are consequences, not causes. Jobs’s great lesson is that a brand’s true equity is built in the synapses: in that moment when the brand, ahead of the need, manages to install itself as a reflex.

Jobs left Apple behind as the automatic first choice of the Western brain, and to a large extent the global one. More than a decade after his death, that mechanism continues to work, undisturbed, below the threshold of consumers’ rational decision-making. This, scientifically speaking, is brand equity: the persistence of a preference that operates before evaluation has even taken place.

There is an enormous difference between being preferred and being preselected. A brand that works only on conversion data stakes everything on the moment of purchase: those few seconds in which the consumer compares, evaluates and decides. A brand that works on brand equity, by contrast, has already won before the comparison begins. It is the standard, not the option. This difference may not show in quarterly metrics, but it does show in ten-year market share, as well as in loyalty that withstands competitors’ promotions.

As a designer, there is a thought I want to add. For years we have heard the formula “differentiate, be different, stand out” repeated. I have heard it hundreds of times, in a hundred different meetings, in front of a hundred unique briefs. But look closely, and it is an incomplete formula, and in some cases a misleading one. The ultimate goal of a brand is not to be different. The goal is to become the first choice. And although the two are often confused, they are not the same thing at all. Differentiation is a tool, not an end. You can be different and completely irrelevant. You can be different in a way that consumers cannot even categorise, to the point of forgetting you. Being the first choice, by contrast, is an outcome. It is earned by building consistency, recognisability and familiarity, and by installing in the target’s mental territories those distinctive signals the brain learns to recognise before it has to judge them.

We cannot be everyone’s first choice. This needs saying clearly, because we often forget it. Yet we can, and must, be the first choice for our target audience. At least enough to position ourselves within people’s mental shortcuts.

This is what Jobs did with his consumers, without the tools we have today: simply through a rare ability to put himself inside the mindset of the person buying.

The font, in that meeting, was not a whim. It was an investment in the future of millions of people who did not yet know they wanted to buy a Mac. And this is exactly what every brand should remember to do when board pressure calls for cuts to the line item that looks least defensible, but which is in fact the only one that, twenty years on, can still be worth an empire.