Steve Jobs

Nichole Stella is group president/publishing director of Promo Marketing Media Group, which consists of Print+Promo, Promo Marketing and NonProfitPro.

If you read through interviews, magazine articles, and stories about Steve Jobs, you're never going to hear him say, "Here are my branding tips," or "Here is how you build your brand." Jobs didn't operate under a cut-and-dried, connect part-A to part-B mentality.

For Steve Jobs, branding wasn't some secondary objective, peripheral to his "true" objective of making great consumer products. Branding was within everything that he did. Click below to read seven inspiring quotes, through which you can get a taste of Steve Jobs's brand-building philosophy.

Steve Jobs said the name Apple Computer was created to edge out his former employer Atari in the front of the phone book. That's not the most visionary branding strategy. But over the years, however, Jobs' approach to branding evolved, and he came to realize the importance of aligning the Apple brand with the values represented by the company.

All great companies strive to accomplish this feat, but very few actually succeed. Today, I will focus on the American companies that are dominating around the world. Their brands form a strategic advantage that can lead to above-average returns for investors.

Steve Jobs helped lead a company that made consumers want a device before they knew they wanted it, with very little product testing and—in the case of the iPad—against the advice of market analysts who said nobody would find a need for one. He was a marketing iconoclast.

The death of Steve Jobs is not just a monumental loss to the technology industry, but as Barack Obama said as he paid tribute to the co-founder, "the world has lost a visionary"—particularly the world of marketing.

Recently, Apple unveiled the new iPad 2. It was exciting to see the upgrades on the device, but more than the new bells and whistles, what was really exciting to see was Steve Jobs at the helm.

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