The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty (29 page)

Those blue shirts the fake store attempted to copy were the result of paying attention to design details, down to how retail store employees dress. Apple learned that when employees wore black T-shirts, they blended in with their customers. Wearing too many colors resulted in confusion. Blue shirts were just right. Apple makes sure everything is just right, from its shirts to its stores and, of course, its products.

Early Apple investor Mike Markkula defined the principles that would serve as the foundation of the brand. The one-page document, titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy,” stressed three points.
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First, Apple would have “empathy,” understanding the needs of and the feelings of its customers. Second, Apple would focus, eliminating unimportant opportunities. Third, and most important for this chapter, was a concept Markkula called “impute,” which meant that people form an opinion about a company based on the impression it creates. A company can have the best, highest quality products, but if those products are presented poorly, it doesn’t matter. Markkula was adamant that everything the customer saw—and things the customer didn’t see—should create an impression about the brand. The Apple experience begins from the first impression and lasts through every impression moving forward. Apple has passion for the smallest detail. Every design detail matters, and it matters a lot.

Steve Jobs paid attention to the details, sometimes obsessively so. But nobody would deny that his preciseness made every product better. Jobs paid attention to the details that nobody else saw, and if they did notice, the details would appear to be so inconsequential as to not make a difference. But when those details came together, they did make a difference in the experience customers would have with the brand.

At the elegant, five-level Apple Store in Tokyo’s Ginza district, most visitors will tell you that they remember the cool glass elevator
that allows them to see each floor. Ask to describe the handrails, and nobody will have noticed. Steve Jobs did. When he visited the Ginza store—a high-profile store because it was the first to open outside the United States—he ordered the stainless steel handrail to be changed because he wanted the mill lines of the steel to wrap around the tube instead of along its length. It was aesthetically more pleasing. Jobs wanted the first Macintosh to have the curves of a Porsche, not a Ferrari. Details mattered. Jobs wanted pop-up dialog boxes on the Mac screen to have rounded corners instead of straight rectangles. Details mattered. Jobs criticized the initial design of the first Mac because the “radius of the first chamfer needs to be bigger, and I don’t like the size of the bevel.”
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Details mattered to Jobs.

Two important men shaped Jobs’s design aesthetic—his father and the German designer Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus movement. From his dad, Jobs learned the importance of maintaining a commitment to quality and excellence, even when no one else paid attention. “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,”
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said Jobs.

Jobs’s commitment to design excellence would often drive engineers crazy. When the Macintosh was first being developed in the early 1980s, Jobs disliked the first designs of the printed circuit boards that would hold the chips and other components inside the computer. He thought they were “ugly” because the lines were too close. When engineers countered with the argument that the design did not impact the performance of the PC and that nobody would see the board anyway, Jobs reacted, “I want it to be as beautiful as possible, even if it’s inside the box.”
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In addition to his father’s influence, Jobs’s design aesthetic was shaped by the Bauhaus movement of industrial design, which stressed simple, elegant, and beautiful design elements. “So that’s our approach,”
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Jobs once proclaimed to his Apple team. “Very simple. We’re shooting for Museum of Modern Art quality. The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Here’s
the problem most brands face when trying to make things simple and elegant—hard work gets in the way. It takes effort, commitment, and courage to keep things simple. Steve Jobs had all three.

I once visited a manufacturing plant in the central valley town of Modesto, California. I was doing some research for an upcoming speech to a group of manufacturing executives, and some members of the group ran this particular company. The massive building was filled with highly complex equipment to convert corrugated cardboard into all sorts of boxes. Manufacturing product boxes is extremely complex, requiring highly specialized and very expensive equipment to make millions of boxes with displays or ones that are folded in complex dimensions.

This particular manufacturer had many clients, including pharmaceutical companies, food brands, and computer makers. But its most demanding client—far tougher than all the others—was Apple. Every detail matters to Apple: how curves look on the edges of a box, how letters feel to the touch, how easy the boxes are to open. Everything had to enhance the experience customers enjoyed when opening their products. For Apple, corrugated cardboard could be transformed into more than a box. It could be used to create a work of art.

As a result of this obsession with detail in packaging, videos of people “unboxing” Apple products have become unlikely hits on YouTube. If you have a lot of free time on your hands, you can spend countless hours watching thousands of videos of people taking new Macbooks, iPods, iPhones, and iPads out of their boxes. The psychology behind the unboxing phenomenon is simple to understand. In a world of increased clutter, people crave simplicity. When you open an Apple product, the first and only thing you see is the actual device. No cords, manuals, or accessories clutter the first impression. Customers unboxing their products on YouTube seem to enjoy the bold graphics, textures, and the logical way each component is revealed as the layers inside the box are exposed.

Many college students display the boxes proudly in their dorm rooms. It’s almost as though people feel that there’s something
wrong about throwing them away. That’s the way Steve Jobs wanted it. He wanted Apple’s products, including the packages, to resemble works of art. And art, in Jobs’s opinion, could be beautiful on the outside and the inside. “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains, of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service,”
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said Jobs.

The industrial designer Yves Behar made the argument that Steve Jobs changed everything about the way executives judge the value of design in their products and the retail experience. According to Behar, “Apple’s dominance in the smartphone, laptop, digital music, app, and retail integration has stunned (and changed) the world. And Steve’s holistic design vision across every aspect of the company is the primary driver for Apple’s dominance.”
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Behar says that when people come to his design agency and say, “I want to be the Apple of this or that,” he asks them if they are ready to be Steve Jobs. Behar says few people are up to the task. He means that Apple is committed to design excellence in every aspect of the customer experience and that few people have the commitment and courage to do what it takes to stand out. For example, how many of us pay attention to the tile in a store? According to Apple, “We’ve also learned more than a few things about stone. Like how to reveal granite’s true color with a blowtorch. And that sometimes granite has veins of color that have to be matched. We’ve also learned that getting the details perfect can feel like trying to move a mountain. Sometimes two. But in the end, the effort is worth it. Because steel, glass, and stone can combine to create truly unique and inspiring spaces.”
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This book is not about retail design. If you want to learn more about glass, wood, or flooring in the Apple Store, there are plenty of resources that track every detail to the exact dimension. The most comprehensive is Gary Allen’s blog,
ifoapplestore.com
. Read Gary’s blog to learn things such as:

 

• Tables are made of Canadian sugar maple, and they are enormously complex to make and assemble.
  
 

• Ceilings in many stores are made of specialized, one-piece plastic material stretched over perimeter frames.
  
 

• Tiles are thirty-inch squares of Pietra Serena sandstone mined from the Sienna district of Italy (outside of Florence).
  

Design details should matter to everyone, regardless of what field they are in. Design matters. Is your website easy to navigate? Good design will make it easy for your customers to find what they want. Is your content easy to understand? Is your product simple and intuitive? Design counts and details matter in all areas of your business, but especially in the area of customer service. Let’s look at how two companies, one large and one small, pay attention to design details to create unique experiences in one of the most commoditized categories—coffee.

On January 8, 2008, Howard Schultz reclaimed his title as CEO of Starbucks after an eight-year hiatus. The brand had lost its way. Sales were in a free fall, the stock price was plunging, fewer people were going to Starbucks, and those who did visit were spending less. The company had to eliminate 12,000 positions and close 600 stores. Over the next three years, Starbucks would regain its mojo, recording its highest sales ever and seeing its stock price hit all-time highs despite an ongoing global recession.

Schultz’s return to Starbucks started nearly a year earlier on February 14, 2007, when a stinging memo he wrote to internal leadership was unwittingly made public. In the memo, Schultz had
expressed his displeasure with what he called the commoditization of the Starbucks experience. When I read the memo, Schultz’s attention to details stood out for me. Read through the following points that Schultz made in his e-mail, and ask yourself whether you would have considered these details to describe the decline in the Starbucks experience that Schultz observed. According to Schultz, here is where Starbucks had lost its way.

 

• When we went to automatic espresso machines, we solved a major problem in terms of speed of service and efficiency. At the same time we overlooked the fact that we would remove much of the romance and theater that was in play.
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• The height of the new machines blocked the visual sight line the customer previously had to watch the drink being made and for the intimate experience with the barista.
  
 

• The need for fresh-roasted coffee moved us toward the decision and the need for flavor locked packaging … we achieved fresh-roasted, bagged coffee, but at what cost? The loss of aroma—perhaps the most powerful nonverbal signal we had in our stores; the loss of our people scooping fresh coffee from the bins and grinding it fresh in front of the customer.
  
 

• Stores no longer have the soul of the past and reflect a chain of stores versus the warm feeling of a neighborhood store. Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee.
  

When Schultz returned as the Starbucks CEO, one of his strategic initiatives was to reignite the emotional attachment with customers. “The equity of the Starbucks brands was steeped in the unique experience customers have from the moment they walk into the store,”
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said Schultz. He believed that stores can make emotional connections through the stories they tell. And everything tells the story. “Ideally, every Starbucks store should tell a story about coffee and what we as an organization believe in. That story should unfold via the taste and presentation of our products as well as the sights, sounds, and smells that surround our customers. The aroma
of freshly ground coffee. Interior hues, textures, the shapes and materials of furniture and fixtures as well as their origins. The art on the walls. The music. The rhythm of the coffee bar and how our partners move and speak behind the counter—and what they speak about.” Schultz went as far as closing every Starbucks for several hours to retrain every barista and to recapture the art of making coffee.

According to Schultz, the baristas—the customer facing employees who are largely responsible for creating the Starbucks experience—had lost their passion because they were not learning the Starbucks story or being reminded of its mission. They were being handed three-ring binders with rules, techniques, and information, and they were told to read it. For too many employees—Starbucks calls them “partners”—Starbucks had become a job. And as you know by now, once your employees think of their roles as nothing but a job, the passion and commitment to excellence will start to wane.