Last night, I finished Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography of Steve Jobs. And though it contains a wealth of material to blog about, I was particularly struck by the tale of the development of the Apple Stores, for a reason that cuts to the core of communications and marketing: knowing your audience.
Ron Johnson oversaw the development and rollout of the ultimately successful Apple Stores – and they have indeed proven to be a huge retail success, by the way. Just to put it in perspective, consider the following citation from the book: “In July 2011, a decade after the first [stores] opened, there were 326 Apple Stores… The average annual revenue per store was $34 million, and the total sales in fiscal 2010 were $9.8 billion.”
What intrigued me about this story within a biography was how Johnson revolutionized the stores’ concept with a last-minute change in approach to the stores’ layout, a brainstorm he had in the middle of the night shortly before the prototype was to be introduced to Apple’s Board of Directors.
Prototyping
Like all Apple products, a prototype of the Apple Store was built in 2000 – in a warehouse near the Apple campus in Cupertino. It was furnished completely, and then the design team hung out there, tweaking and adjusting it until they felt comfortable with the concept and its many components. Johnson led the effort for Apple, and Jobs would stop by about once a week to monitor progress and make suggestions for improvement.
After fiddling with nearly every aspect of the prototype repeatedly, Jobs and Johnson felt they were ready to invite the Board to see it. But Johnson woke in the middle of the night with a bad feeling:
Confronting Steve Jobs with bad news was always dangerous, but Johnson felt strongly about it and urged him to start the design process all over again. After exploding in anger, Jobs sat silently in the car and thought about what Johnson had recommended on their way to visit the model.
Jobs then presented it to the design group with these words: “Ron thinks we’ve got it all wrong. He thinks it should be organized not around products but instead around what people do.” [long pause] “And you know, he’s right… We’ve got only one chance to get it right.”
Swarming With Customers
And boy, did they get it right. Have you ever been to an Apple Store when it wasn’t crowded? Me neither. While the other mall stores near it may be quiet, the Apple Store is noisy, aswarm with customers and browsers. It never ceases to amaze me.
This demonstrates a core tenet of successful marketing and, in the same sense, successful communications. Reach people on their turf, respond to how they live their lives and communicate, not how you want them to, and you’re guaranteed to get their attention.
It is something I learned early in my career, a lesson that has never failed me. When I was a suburban beat reporter for a daily newspaper, once while struggling with a particularly complicated story about a town commission’s meeting, I grew frustrated at finding the right narrative.
Knowing that I was facing a fast-approaching deadline, my editor pulled me aside to help me get focused. He posed a series of questions that cut to the core of my dilemma. His questions weren’t about the point of the story or its details, but rather about my readers.
Who were my readers? What was their likely interest in the story and the decisions of this particularly commission? How would the commission’s actions and decisions affect my readers? So what would they likely want to know?
As the effect of his questions began to sink in, I fairly jumped out of my seat to return to my writing. The light bulb had gone on and I whipped out the story easily and quickly.
What I had been missing was a clear understanding of focus and purpose. Without either, writing is an exercise in a vacuum to no end. The same is true in corporate communications and marketing.
When you expend the necessary upfront effort to appreciate your audience, to understand what truly drives them and what they want and need from you, you are well past the halfway point in your journey to connect with them successfully. Will the result always be on par with the Apple Store? Maybe not, but you don’t stand a prayer for any success without that crucial first step.
The germ of the idea about the customers’ world that disturbed Ron Johnson’s sleep more than ten years ago made all the difference.
Ron Johnson oversaw the development and rollout of the ultimately successful Apple Stores – and they have indeed proven to be a huge retail success, by the way. Just to put it in perspective, consider the following citation from the book: “In July 2011, a decade after the first [stores] opened, there were 326 Apple Stores… The average annual revenue per store was $34 million, and the total sales in fiscal 2010 were $9.8 billion.”
What intrigued me about this story within a biography was how Johnson revolutionized the stores’ concept with a last-minute change in approach to the stores’ layout, a brainstorm he had in the middle of the night shortly before the prototype was to be introduced to Apple’s Board of Directors.
Prototyping
Like all Apple products, a prototype of the Apple Store was built in 2000 – in a warehouse near the Apple campus in Cupertino. It was furnished completely, and then the design team hung out there, tweaking and adjusting it until they felt comfortable with the concept and its many components. Johnson led the effort for Apple, and Jobs would stop by about once a week to monitor progress and make suggestions for improvement.
After fiddling with nearly every aspect of the prototype repeatedly, Jobs and Johnson felt they were ready to invite the Board to see it. But Johnson woke in the middle of the night with a bad feeling:
“…they had gotten something fundamentally wrong. They were organizing the store around each of Apple’s main product lines… But Jobs had begun developing a new concept: the computer as a hub for all your digital activity. In other words, your computer might handle video and pictures from your cameras, and perhaps someday your music player and songs, or your books and magazines. Johnson’s predawn brainstorm was that the stores should organize displays not just around the company’s four lines of computers, but also around things that people might want to do.”
Confronting Steve Jobs with bad news was always dangerous, but Johnson felt strongly about it and urged him to start the design process all over again. After exploding in anger, Jobs sat silently in the car and thought about what Johnson had recommended on their way to visit the model.
Jobs then presented it to the design group with these words: “Ron thinks we’ve got it all wrong. He thinks it should be organized not around products but instead around what people do.” [long pause] “And you know, he’s right… We’ve got only one chance to get it right.”
Swarming With Customers
And boy, did they get it right. Have you ever been to an Apple Store when it wasn’t crowded? Me neither. While the other mall stores near it may be quiet, the Apple Store is noisy, aswarm with customers and browsers. It never ceases to amaze me.
This demonstrates a core tenet of successful marketing and, in the same sense, successful communications. Reach people on their turf, respond to how they live their lives and communicate, not how you want them to, and you’re guaranteed to get their attention.
It is something I learned early in my career, a lesson that has never failed me. When I was a suburban beat reporter for a daily newspaper, once while struggling with a particularly complicated story about a town commission’s meeting, I grew frustrated at finding the right narrative.
Knowing that I was facing a fast-approaching deadline, my editor pulled me aside to help me get focused. He posed a series of questions that cut to the core of my dilemma. His questions weren’t about the point of the story or its details, but rather about my readers.
Who were my readers? What was their likely interest in the story and the decisions of this particularly commission? How would the commission’s actions and decisions affect my readers? So what would they likely want to know?
As the effect of his questions began to sink in, I fairly jumped out of my seat to return to my writing. The light bulb had gone on and I whipped out the story easily and quickly.
What I had been missing was a clear understanding of focus and purpose. Without either, writing is an exercise in a vacuum to no end. The same is true in corporate communications and marketing.
When you expend the necessary upfront effort to appreciate your audience, to understand what truly drives them and what they want and need from you, you are well past the halfway point in your journey to connect with them successfully. Will the result always be on par with the Apple Store? Maybe not, but you don’t stand a prayer for any success without that crucial first step.
The germ of the idea about the customers’ world that disturbed Ron Johnson’s sleep more than ten years ago made all the difference.
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