A true visionary, Apple’s late CEO was known to take action against bad press before things spiraled out of control

Sep 29, 2014 13:24 GMT  ·  By

“What would have Steve done?” An age old question that has become one of the biggest clichés in tech and probably other industries as well. But it always springs to mind whenever Apple faces PR troubles.

It’s all too well known that Apple’s late CEO was easily ticked off by bad press. Regardless of their social status, profession, or net income, calling people on their errors was like second nature to the man.

Remember “Thoughts About Flash” or “Antennagate?” Well, let’s just say had Jobs not acted on those the way he did, the media would have eaten the iPhone and iPad alive.

Using history as a frame for this write-up, let's try and picture how Jobs would have handled the #bendgate, the term used by the Internet to describe the presumed "bending" nature of the iPhone 6 Plus.

Call in the troops

Whenever something went seriously wrong, Jobs would call a meeting. 99 percent of those times everyone hoped to still have a job when the meeting would be adjourned. He’d shout at the guilty staffers, call them on their mistakes, and then ground them to their office until the problem got fixed.

Sometimes he’d fire the people responsible for a certain bug or a design flaw. He wouldn’t tell HR to do it either. He’d do it personally, ensuring that the staffer felt guilty for what he’d done, or failed to do. It was totalitarian, primitive, and humiliating. But it worked.

Knowing you’d get that for not doing your job properly was enough to keep people in the office past dinner time.

Call in the press

If the technicalities were said and done, then there was nothing to do except convince people that they were doing it wrong. Jobs was actually quoted on that – “you’re holding it wrong” – when a user emailed him about the iPhone 4’s reception problems. How arrogant does one have to be to tell the customer he’s incapable of understanding the product?

Well, believe it or not, even this helped mend the situation. Speaking of interaction with the public...

Talk to users directly

Jobs loved his kingdom. A somewhat narcissistic type, the man created a cult around the Apple brand, something that helped him amass hundreds of millions of adopters. He wasn’t just the CEO of Apple or a boss who also happened to get ideas from time to time. No. Apple was his life-long mission. And he treated it as such.

He had his hands in everything surrounding Apple. He was practically lending the PR department a helping hand (more or less) by actually taking the time to answer customers’ emails. As any user will tell you, the product starts to feel a lot more special when the inventor signs off with a personal thank you directed at you and you only. The practice was such a powerful marketing tool that it even made users reading about it in the news feel special too. Simply knowing it was possible that one day Steve would call them up was good enough to overlook some flaws.

Point to competitors’ mistakes

Whenever people would pick at something that he couldn’t fully defend, he’d point his finger at competitors’ wrongdoings. Perhaps the perfect example is the 2010 Antennagate ordeal involving the iPhone 4.

Jobs had the nerve to list a number of phones from competitors like Samsung and Nokia that allegedly experienced similar reception problems, with full specs and detailed analysis. He did so ruthlessly, even by stretching the truth a little. And it worked.

Reality distortion field

When everything else failed, Jobs would just devise a way to muffle negative rumors using anything at hand to just get people’s attention off the reports.

Jobs was famous for his reality distortion methods. He’d either make you believe you were crazy to think different or downright made you think different. Either way, you had to think different. It was the cult's passcode, and everyone (in the Apple ecosystem) wanted in. It wasn’t always fair to the user, and it wasn’t always the Think Different that the ads were portraying, but guess what? It worked.