Marketing Guru Came Out of Retirement to Help Steve Jobs With Antennagate Crisis

Marketing guru Regis McKenna talks about how he came out of retirement to help Steve Jobs manage the Antennagate crisis in a recent interview with AdAge.

McKenna led Apple's first ad and public-relations shop. In 1981 he sold his ad business to Jay Chiat and his public relations business in 1995.

Interestingly, McKenna believes that Apple's famous '1984' ad is overrated.


"I learned in the "70s that the ads won all the awards, but the company went bankrupt. I've always lived with that maxim. In a way, that's what happened with the "1984" ad. Apple went into 10 years of decline after that. It didn't have anything to do with the attention, because the ad still gets attention. It had to do with the wrong product.

The ad was more successful than the Mac itself. The Mac was expensive to build, and Apple's margins went negative in 1986. That conflict led to Steve's ouster from Apple. The ad had some negative effect on corporate buyers, who were flocking to IBM. They didn't like seeing themselves as mindless [followers]. But Apple wasn't really ready for the corporate market anyway. "1984" came out of the Chiat agency, and they set the creative bar in many ways. The ad set an attitude of rebellion against the status quo, and it probably continues to serve Apple today. "

Although McKenna retired from consulting in 2000, Steve Jobs turned to him for help with the iPhone 4 Antennagate crisis.

"Steve called me from Hawaii and told me he had a big problem. I knew what it was because I had been reading about it. He asked if I would meet him at Apple the next day, where he led a group discussion. I looked at the data, which was really interesting. They had more complaints and service calls on the phone before it than they did on the iPhone 4. Because of that, I did not think it was a significant problem. I thought it was a media-cycle issue and that they should address it with the data they had and be confident about the outcome rather than be apologetic. That's what Steve did. The issue vanished within probably 10 days. My conversations with Steve over the years became more friends and personal than business. That wasn't a business contact, at least in my mind or in his; it was more calling somebody who had been a friend for many years and asking "What do you think?'"


You can read the full AdAge interview at the link below...

Read More [via Gizmodo]