I spend a lot of my time meeting with startups, and it usually takes three or four long meetings just to explain what marketing is all about. They start out with a fundamental question — should we be advertising more? — and they use the word “brand” very loosely. I always say don’t use that word, because brands are built. They don’t just exist because you run an ad or because you create a nifty logo. The brand comes from the consumer’s view. How do you build innovation into your product? How do you design the product in a way so that it sells itself?
— Regis McKenna (2012) Apple’s First Marketing Guru On Why ‘1984’ Is Overrated

A short but interesting serie of questions to the creative mind behind the historic “1984” ad. The answers aren’t really good aphorisms to be quoted, but they contain a lot of interesting details and advices hidden in them.

One of the most important for me is about the concept of brand, and the detail that it takes as long as three or four meetings for someone as experienced as him to make understand what really marketing is to startups.

It’s true, most of the people get marketing wrong, and branding wrong. Or, from another perspective, they get the dark side of marketing. The critical sentence there is connecting the “brand” with “How do you design the product in a way so that it sells itself?”. Because, in the end, the trick is as simple and as complex as that.