The marketing memo that decided your first impression matters this much

Mike Markkula, who became Apple's first chairman when Jobs and Wozniak were still working out of a garage, wrote a one-page paper called 'The Apple Marketing Philosophy' that would quietly shape the rest of Jobs's career. It laid out three principles. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with what customers actually feel. The second was focus, doing a small number of things well rather than many things poorly. The third, awkwardly named but the one Jobs never forgot, was impute.

The idea behind impute was simple and a little uncomfortable: people form an opinion about a product based on the signals it sends, whether or not those signals have anything to do with the product's actual quality. 'People DO judge a book by its cover,' Markkula wrote. 'We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.'

Jobs took this further than almost anyone would have expected. When it came time to design the box the Macintosh would ship in, packaging that a customer would look at for perhaps thirty seconds before throwing it away, Jobs had the design redone roughly fifty times. Alain Rossmann, a member of the Mac team, thought it revealed a strange lack of balance, since Apple was simultaneously trying to save money on internal memory chips. But to Jobs, the box was never just packaging. It was the first sentence of a conversation with the customer, and he intended to control how that conversation started.

The same logic decided Apple's logo. The designer Rob Janoff produced two versions of an apple shape, one whole, one with a bite taken out. The whole apple, on its own, looked too much like a cherry. The bitten one was instantly, unmistakably an apple. Jobs chose the flawed-looking option because it communicated faster and more clearly than the technically tidier one.

Decades later, describing the unwrapping experience of the iPhone and iPad, Jobs credited this exact lesson. 'Mike taught me that,' he said. The insight had outlived the man who wrote it on a single page.

Start by putting your own version of Markkula's philosophy into words, deciding what you want someone to feel in the very first seconds of encountering your work, before they've judged anything about its substance. Give that first touchpoint disproportionate effort, the way Jobs redesigned the Macintosh's box roughly fifty times even though it was headed straight for the trash within minutes. When you're choosing between two options that are close in quality, weigh how quickly and clearly each one will actually be understood, not just which one is more technically correct, the way an apple logo with a bite taken out beat a whole apple that read, at a glance, as a cherry. And once the first impression is right, make sure what's underneath actually earns it, because a great cover on a hollow product only buys you one disappointed customer.