To the casual consumer Apple stands for high prices and their walled garden strategy or the Apple ecosystem. To those more sophisticated, Apple stands for the primacy of design.
But neither is correct, what sets Apple apart and has from Day One, thanks to Steve Jobs, is their relentless focus on the consumer experience. That experience starts with elegant, cool advertising and leading edge retail stores. When computer retail stores were dying Jobs launched Apple stores, which were widely derided by the cognoscenti at the time, but have gone on to be the leading retailer in the world as judged by the retailing metric of revenue per square foot. Rather than a typical retailer’s transactional focus, Apple stores focused on the customer store experience, inviting people in to see, touch, play with, and learn about its products in a comfortable, aesthetically pleasing place.
Once you buy an Apple product you will see the Steve Jobs’ touch in the packaging – every element of the package reflects the Apple ethos of clean and elegant design. Unboxing videos of Apple products have become a thing on YouTube, now emulated by fans of dozens of other products.
While other hardware companies touted specs – what we used to call speeds and feeds – Apple has always offered extreme ease of use and a very shallow learning curve for its products. Features and performance won’t be taken advantage of if you first present the customer with a clunky, hard to use interface. People who used to bill themselves as user interface(UI) designers now have gone up the value chain to become user experience (UX) designers. Apple’s influence has created an entirely new profession!
As Tony Fadell, father of the iPod and very close relative of the iPhone said, “At Apple Steve Jobs showed him how to go beyond designing a product; the key is to design the customer’s whole experience, from packaging to messaging.” Apple’s recent focus on services from Apple Music to iPay to their new credit care extends the customer experience beyond hardware and software to provide a seamless mesh of services to deliver the simple and elegant Apple experience post-product purchase.
Solving a problem for your customer is necessary, but not sufficient. Designing a clear and simple UI is also necessary, but not sufficient. What founders must do is to design their customer’s experience from marketing communications to product first use to tightly integrated services that add value to the product. It’s far too easy for founders to think they are on their way once they find a solution to a customer problem. But your journey has just started! You need to think through every element of the customer’s experience from marketing to using the product to solve a problem to upgrading to the latest software and services on offer and polish every elements of that experience so it shines brightly.
Mentorphile 