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Twitter is changing the nature of business communi-
    cation in a fundamental way—it forces people to write concisely.
    The maximum post—or tweet—is 140 characters. Characters
    include letters, spaces, and punctuation. For example, Jobs’s
    description of the MacBook Air takes thirty characters, includ-
    ing the period: “The world’s thinnest notebook.”

    Jobs has a one-line description for nearly every product, and
    it is carefully created in the planning stage well before the pre-
    sentation, press releases, and marketing material are finished.
    Most important, the headline is consistent. On January 15,
    2008, the day of the MacBook Air announcement, the headline
    was repeated in every channel of communication: presentations,
    website, interviews, advertisements, billboards, and posters.

    In Table 4.1, you see how Apple and Jobs consistently deliv-
    ered the vision behind MacBook Air.

    Most presenters cannot describe their company, product,
    or service in one sentence. Understandably, it becomes nearly
    Setting the Stage for the Marketing Blitz
    The minute Jobs delivers a headline onstage, the Apple
    publicity and marketing teams kick into full gear. Posters are
    dropped down inside the Macworld Expo, billboards go up,
    the front page of the Apple website reveals the product and
    headline, and ads reflect the headline in newspapers and mag-
    azines, as well as on television and radio. Whether it’s “1,000
    songs in your pocket” or “The world’s thinnest notebook,” the
    headline is repeated consistently in all of Apple’s marketing
    channels.

    CREATE TWIT TERLIKE HEADLINES 41
    TABLE 4.1 JOBS’S CONSISTENT HEADLINES FOR MACBOOK AIR
    HEADLINE
    SOURCE
    ”What is MacBook Air? In a
    Keynote presentation
    sentence, it’s the world’s thinnest
    notebook. ”2
    “The world’s thinnest notebook. ”3
    Words on Jobs’s slide
    “This is the MacBook Air. It’s the
    Promoting the new notebook in a
    thinnest notebook in the world. ”4
    CNBC interview immediately after
    his keynote presentation
    “We decided to build the world’s
    A second reference to MacBook Air
    thinnest notebook. ”5
    in the same CNBC interview
    “MacBook Air. The world’s thinnest
    Tagline that accompanied the
    notebook.”
    full-screen photograph of the new
    product on Apple’s home page
    “Apple Introduces MacBook Air—
    Apple press release
    The World’s Thinnest Notebook. ”6
    “We’ve built the world’s thinnest
    Steve Jobs quote in the Apple press
    notebook. ”7
    release
    impossible to create consistent messaging without a prepared
    headline developed early in the planning stage. The rest of the
    presentation should be built around it.
    Today Apple Reinvents the Phone
    On January 9, 2007, PC World ran an article that announced
    Apple would “Reinvent the Phone” with a new device that com-
    bined three products: a mobile phone, an iPod, and an Internet
    communicator. That product, of course, was the iPhone. The
    iPhone did, indeed, revolutionize the industry and was rec-
    ognized by Time magazine as the invention of the year. (Just
    two years after its release, by the end of 2008, the iPhone had
    grabbed 13 percent of the smartphone market.) The editors at PC

    42 CREATE THE STORY
    World did not create the headline themselves. Apple provided it in its press release, and Steve Jobs reinforced it in his keynote
    presentation at Macworld. Apple’s headline was specific, memo-
    rable, and consistent: “Apple Reinvents the Phone.”

    During the keynote presentation in which Jobs unveiled the
    iPhone, he used the phrase “reinvent the phone” five times.
    After walking the audience through the phone’s features,
    he hammered it home once again: “I think when you have a
    chance to get your hands on it, you’ll agree, we have reinvented
    the phone. ”8
    Jobs does not wait for the media to create a headline. He
    writes it himself and repeats it several times in his presenta-
    tion. Jobs delivers the headline