Tag: apple

What do people who demand innovations from Apple just don’t understand
Apple is no longer appealing to technology enthusiasts. This is an element of a well-known and perfectly executed strategy that is called “crossing the chasm”. Let’s try and explain what people who demand innovations from Apple just don’t understand.

Two Books Tim Cook Has Definitely Read

Crossing The Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore

In 1991 a book titled Crossing The Chasm appeared, with the subtitle Marketing And Selling High-tech Products To Mainstream Markets. The author, Geoffrey Moore had worked in McKenna Group as a consultant for tech companies from Silicon Valley. It is there that he noticed a peculiar regularity when it comes to implementing innovations. But before I tell you about this regularity, I must introduce you to yet another book, because it contains an idea that was fundamental to what Moore was observing.

“Diffusion of Innovations” by Everett Rogers

Exactly 29 years before Crossing The Chasm a groundbreaking work on implementing innovations saw the light of day: Diffusion of Innovations by Everett Rogers. If you are working in a business that is even remotely connected to innovations, both these titles are required reading for you. Rogers’ key idea was called product life cycle — he divided implementing the innovations into phases (development, introduction to the market, growth, maturity & saturation, and decline), then he named four groups of consumers who would be interested in innovation at each of the phases. These groups are:
- Innovators — technology enthusiasts, seeking new things, willing to sacrifice their convenience for the privilege of being first. Think of all those Dropbox beta testers or the ones who stood in line to buy the first iPhone back in 2007.
- Early Adopters — the visionaries who had read some enthusiastic reviews from the innovators and want to implement the new technology as soon as possible. They may be not willing to sign up for the beta test, but they are eager to read the first reviews and… buy soon after.
- Early Majority are pragmatics. They invest in technology when they see real benefits, and when someone has proven that it really works, the market is growing fond of it. Convenience and support are much more appealing to them than new features. They go to Radio Shack to buy a tablet and they choose the iPad “because everybody has it”.
- A Late Majority is a group of technological conservatives. They approach innovations carefully, and only when the solution becomes a de facto industry standard are they willing to give it a try.
- Laggards are very skeptical of innovations. If they could, they wouldn’t have changed a thing. The only reason they buy touch screen smartphones today is that they can no longer buy their favorite Nokias with big keys. The cloud in 2019? No kidding, there’s still time for that…
The chasm is where your innovative, disruptive products begin to spread among the mainstream users — the pragmatics are considering using it. And do you know what the problem is? Well, both groups on the left of the chasm want new features and performance while all the groups on the right of the chasm prefer convenience and reliability.

Abandon all your customers you who enter here

Quick question: do you know the name of the chip powering your phone? If you answered “yes” chances are you’re a technology enthusiast, you read the performance comparison tables, and it matters to you whether your phone has 64 or 128 GB of memory, whether it has a replaceable memory card. And if you answered “no”? You are more interested in a phone “just working” so you can do what you need to do with it (and by “what you need to do” you don’t mean “replacing the factory-issued ROM” or even “change the default system apps”). The first iPhone had apps (innovators were drooling over), yet it did not allow you to send MMS (pragmatics raise their brows in amazement). Crossing the chasm (i.e. targeting an innovative, disruptive product towards the mainstream market) means changing two things:
- First, you have to change the product itself, and its communication. Disruptive innovations in each generation are gradually replaced with incremental innovations. What changed in the latest iPhone? Battery life and picture quality. No bells and whistles, no wireless charging of your AirPods. It’s exactly what the market demands.
- Second, target customers change. And this means one of the most difficult business decisions you may be faced with: you need to abandon the people who were your customers so far. The very ones who brought you to the position you are in today. Simply because there’s just not enough of them to power your further growth.
- Case in point: sir Jonathan Ive. Also a visionary who complained that there was nothing left to design at Apple anymore. The company is reusing the same shapes and forms of the iPhone because it works. Because scaling is now more important than innovating.
Instagram: yes. Twitter: not so much.

Twitter should have abandoned its hardcore users long ago.

There are many companies that struggle with crossing the chasm exactly because they are not able to implement the changes I mentioned above. Example? Twitter. The “other” social network not by their choice but because they’re struggling with increasing the market share. But it can’t be done without radical changes within the product itself, changes that will irritate the first, long-time, hardcore users. Twitter was trying. When they announced they were to abandon the 140-character limit of a single tweet, the hardcore users rebelled. The result? Twitter backed down a couple of times (though they shouldn’t have), implemented the change a couple of years too late.

Who did well? Take Instagram. I don’t know if you remember the beginnings of this app (it launched in October 2010) — also as a kind of “the other photo social network” (Flickr dominated the space back then). It differentiated itself with three functions:

Instagram was not afraid to innovate — despite the protests from the hardcore users.
- It was available exclusively on iPhones;
- didn’t allow you to add photos from Camera Roll (which meant you could only share the photos taken within the app, here and now)
- the only proportions it allowed were square photos.
The first Instagram users were proud of this “eliteness”. Well, it didn’t last. One day they woke up to Instagram opening itself to Android (March 2012), and abandoning the “in-app photos only” policy, allowing professional photographers to share their professionally-taken photos… Hardcore users screamed “Betrayal!” but nobody listened because Instagram grew like crazy.

In April 2012 it was bought by Facebook for around 1 billion dollars — an investment that proved great because in the following year Facebook grew only 3% while Instagram grew… 23%. So abandoning the innovators turned out to be a good thing.

Starting from August 2015 the photos no longer need to be square…

A Company Led By Accountants

“The company forgot what it means to make great products,”
Steve Jobs on Xerox’ demise

Ned Hermann’s “The Whole Brain Business Book” served as the basis for Robertson’s work

The pundits are comparing the above quote from Steve Jobs to Apple’s situation today. And this is exactly what crossing the chasm means. But there is one more thing… The recurring theme I often read is “Apple without Steve Jobs is not the same company. They lack passion and vision. Tim Cook’s Apple is a well-rounded tech company, but is it enough to keep a leader’s position?” The answer to this question was provided by Peter Robertson, an American-Belgian psychologist who specializes in management styles. Robertson took an analytical method called HBDI (Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument, developed some time ago for General Electric) and combined it with… Rogers’ product life cycle curve. HBDI is a tool that diagnoses which of the four parts of your brain is dominant when you’re making managerial decisions. These areas are:
- Logic (blue) — your thinking is analytical, you are fact-based, numbers matter.
- Vision (yellow) — you see “the big picture”, you rely on your intuition, you’re great at synthesis and connecting the dots (facts and areas that are seemingly not related).
- People (red) — your interpersonal relations are very important, you build emotional bonds, you are a great negotiator.
- Control (green) — procedures, planning, and details are what matters to you, you are a well-organized person.
The Whole Brain Model by Hermann Global LLC

Jobs was clearly a visionary, plus there were stories about his total lack of people skills. This — according to Robertson — is a perfect managerial style for the first phase of implementing an innovation: development. But when your product gains market share and you are faced with the challenges of growth, the “people” and “control” should be dominant factors in your decisions. And while Jobs obsessed over details, I don’t think he was a big fan of plans and procedures. Not to mention maintaining good relations with large groups of people. Yet this is exactly what Apple needed to leave the market niche.

Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s or Mercedes’ or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being a BMW or Mercedes?
Steve Jobs (from Six Marketing Lessons)

Jobs was good at making BMWs. Tim Cook is the perfect “peacetime manager”. He listens to the market, he creates products based on the demand, not the vision, intuition or “because I say so”. Innovators don’t find it attractive, but… Apple is not for them anymore. Just think what Porsche’s hardcore users said when they first saw Porsche Cayenne. “Betrayal!”, “It’s not a Porsche!”. Think Mercedes A-Class, BMW 1… Will the company from Cupertino return to the graces of tech enthusiasts? It will have to, one day… Will they do it with Tim Cook? Well, I have to tell you about yet one more thing.

Jumping The Waves

Every innovation comes to an end — that’s why the product life cycle is shaped like a wave. And the company that intends to survive on the market has to behave like a surfer: it has to know when to jump to the next wave, the one that is on the rise. “Closing sails” on a market (since we stick to marine-and-ocean analogies) requires — according to Robertson — yet another type of a manager (or: management style). The one who ignores interpersonal relations when making critical business decisions. “Logic” and “control” are to dominate. No surprise there, “jumping the wave” means restructuring and often layoffs for the company. I’ve never seen Tim Cook’s HBDI test results, but I suspect he is more of a “peace-time manager” than “war chief”. So he’ll need substantial help from the rest of his team when the time arises. But — as they say in “Game of Thrones” — not today.

I’ll leave you with some more food for thought: perhaps it’s wise to listen to Publius Flavius Vegetius, a Roman historian who — in his De Re Militari (Latin for Concerning Military Matters) treaty wrote: Si vis Pacem, para Bellum. And perhaps this is exactly what Apple is doing right now. Automotive and health market are ripe for the taking when it comes to innovation.
09/11/2019
Six marketing lessons. A tribute to Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs played a great role in shaping how I view brands and marketing today. His return to Apple coincided with the beginning of my fascination with what I do nowadays. He was one of those people who made you think once you began observing him. Why was he successful? Why don’t others act the same way?

I originally wrote this article some years ago, when I heard Steve Jobs had resigned from his role as the CEO of Apple. At that point, he had been fighting a terminal illness for years and had a few victorious battles behind him. I’m far from sentimental, but one can’t just pass by Job’s achievements without a moment of reflection. Hence, here is my little tribute to the man, who – to some degree – helped shape me, marketing lessons, which I “picked up”, observing him through the years. Lessons, which I try to employ in my own company, despite some of them needing an iron will – a trait quite hard to copy. I hope, that what I offer will be of use to you.

Act and don’t worry about what others might think.

One of Job’s unique abilities as a manager was his courage to act without paying much attention to what others might say. People who can pull this off are called visionaries. Jobs wasn’t the first one. Henry Ford, when he launched the mass assembly of his cars, was allegedly asked if he listened to his customer’s opinions. He is said to have replied: If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’ Jobs held consumer research in similar regard. When back in 1988 he was introducing the NeXT OS computer to the market, he said:

You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new. Therefore, if you think, that you have an idea for something truly innovative, do it.
Steve Jobs

Don’t look at others, don’t ask “can I do it?” or “what do you think?”. People who you ask, don’t know half of what you do. Show it to them and they’ll understand.

Do things to the best of your abilities, so that you can sleep soundly.

In 1985 Mac was on a roll. The first computer with a graphic interface, it sold like hot buns. It was expensive, but it owed its success to the fact, that in spite of being mass-produced, it was crafted with an almost artisan attention to details. In an interview he did for Playboy in 1985, Jobs explained his product philosophy:

When you’re a carpenter, making a beautiful chest of drawers, you’re not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it. You’ll know it’s there, so you’re going to use a beautiful piece of wood on the back. For you to sleep well at night…
Steve Jobs

If you run a company, you don’t have to look back at your competition. Do what you’re good at to the best of your ability. You can choose to believe it or not, but everybody expects… less of you. Hence, you’ll give them quite a surprise, giving every endeavor all that you’ve got. Especially, since “doing it the best you can”, will never be above you, right?

Real artists ship!

I have a friend who paints. She finished just a few pictures in her lifetime because… she keeps correcting them. I’m sure that she threw out more of her pieces than she has sold. Even the ones that she did sell, almost had to be taken from her by force. She paints with a sense of piety because she is a true-blue artisan, she wants her pieces to be perfect. The problem is, each day brings new things to correct. All artists are like that. Only a handful of them can muster the will to say “stop” and show their latest masterpiece to the world. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked for Apple in 1984 (the year in which the first Mac hit the shelves) describes the emotions that accompanied him during the last few days before the grand premiere. The team of programmers was convinced, that the operating system needed tweaking, hence they asked Jobs to delay the date of its release. Jobs refused. He was to say:

Real artists ship!

If I were to analyze the phenomenon of Steve Job’s success as a manager and visionary, I would bet my money on the unique blend of two key traits: an obsessive attention to details (something connected to art and craftsmanship) as well as a firm ability to cut himself off from his word and show it to the world (which, in turn, is something attributed to accountants and managers with their ever-pressing budgets and deadlines).

A visionary surrounded by pragmatists

Simon Sinek, Start With Why

Unfortunately, the combination of the aforementioned traits is incredibly rare. I don’t think even Jobs himself could truly cut away from his obsessive attention to details. He could, however, surround himself with people that were able to convince him otherwise. Simon Sinek, in his book Start With Why, tries to convince us that there are two types of managers. On one hand, you have the visionaries who inspire, not because they tell others what to do but because they can present why something has to be done.

Jobs was exactly that kind of visionary. In 1984 he was able to convince people to lock themselves in a separate building, hoisting a pirate banner above the entrance and work restlessly on the new Macintosh. But Steve Jobs would be nobody without Steve Wozniak. That’s because the other kind of managers are people who know how something has to be done. They have the technical knowledge, they navigate among budgets, deadlines, and boundaries. They aren’t visionaries, but without them, the visions would never come true. Jonathan Ive (responsible for such revolutionary products as the iMac or iPhone) and Tim Cook (a capable manager, who took over as the head of Apple after Jobs’ resignation) are examples of people who are a necessary balance for the visionary.

What about you? Which type are you? If you are more of an artist and visionary, make sure to have someone nearby who will keep your feet on the ground. Or perhaps, you prefer to forge visions into action? In that case, you need some creative counterbalance, otherwise – in solitude – your business will fall into the routine.

A brand is a grand idea.

Marketers worldwide for the last three decades have been reaching a conclusion which Steve Jobs sensed all the way in the ’80s. Said conclusion being, that people buy products not for their functionality (let’s be honest here, each computer will let you check your mail and each car will drive you to work) but for their emotional values, for the greater idea behind the brand. Apple’s vision was, that back in 1984… they treated the computer market as a mature market. They didn’t sell a computer – they sold an idea.

Ridley Scott’s famous commercial “1984” never even mentioned what computer it was promoting. It focused solely on why you had to have it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axSnW-ygU5g
Ridley Scott’s Apple 1984 commercial

The idea behind the Apple brand being a “revolution” let them expand their product offer with MP3 players, phones and tablets. All because people never bought their “products” but rather their “idea”.

Watch the following commercial. Made back in 1997 by the TBWA/Chiat/Day agency, it comes from a time when Apple produced only computers. Nevertheless, it could easily be used to advertise the whole range of their products these days. That’s because it sells an idea.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rwsuXHA7RA
Apple’s commercial narrated by Steve Jobs. It was never aired with his voice, they decided to change it in the last minute.

What about you? What idea does your brand sell? Why should people care about it?

A brand is a focus.

One last thing, and one of my favorites too. Do you know what Steve Jobs did when in 1998 he returned to Apple in order to save the company from a collapse? He got rid of most of the products in its catalog. In the ’90s, Apple sold more than just the Macintosh (which came in various models under meaningless names like the LC 550 or LC 575). It also sold the Quadra (610, 630, 650), Performa (5200, 5300, etc.), PowerBooks (190, 1400) and the Power Macintosh series (4400, 5500, 6500, 7300).

The simple product matrix that helped to save Apple

Jobs crossed out the matrix on which one axis divided the products into stationary and portable, and the second axis into professional and casual products. In those four spots, he wrote in the Power Macintosh (professional, stationary), PowerBook (professional, portable), Macintosh (casual, stationary) and… he left the fourth segment empty. Later on, the Macintosh was replaced with an iMac and the empty space was filled by the iBook. Thus, everybody knew which computer suited them the best. This was the exact same way Apple had been selling iPods (iPod Touch – offers different storage space and color), iPhones (two models per generation: regular screen or large screen, plus the standard variety of storage space) or iPads (the iPad and iPad Pro).

Your brand doesn’t have to be for everyone. The greater the discipline you follow in your focus, the more you will earn solely thanks to your loyal customers. Apple earns more by selling one phone model than Nokia ever did on all their models combined. Porsche has better a better profit from selling just a few models than Fiat or Toyota with its wide array of cars.

And since we’re on the topic of Porsche. One last Steve Jobs quote. When asked about his thoughts on the fact, that Apple had a small presence on the computer market, he said:

Apple’s market share is bigger than BMW’s, or Mercedes’s or Porsche’s in the automotive market. What’s wrong with being BMW or Mercedes?

What about you? Would you rather have your company be the Mercedes or Fiat of your market?

08/24/2019