Wow. Steve Jobs was a master of this stuff, even more than two decades ago.
(HT: Techcrunch)
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Archive for the 'Business' Category
Matt Burns writes a great piece over at CrunchGear on how Apple’s success is tied to the fact that it doesn’t confuse customers with too many choices.
There really aren’t that many products: One cellphone, four iPods, three notebooks, and three desktop computers. Now look at HP’s, Dell’s, or even Garmin and TomTom’s product lines. Apple does something different and hopefully others are taking notes.
Apple’s secret sauce: A simple product line.
This reminds me of a section in Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice. Here is Christopher Caldwell writing about it in The New Yorker:
Research in the wake of Kahneman and Tversky has unearthed a number of conundrums around choice. For one thing, choice can be “de-motivating.” In a study conducted several years ago, shoppers who were offered free samples of six different jams were more likely to buy one than shoppers who were offered free samples of twenty-four. This result seems irrational—surely you’re more apt to find something you like from a range four times as large—but it can be replicated in a variety of contexts. Students who are offered six topics they can write about for extra credit, for instance, are more likely to write a paper than students who are offered thirty.
Felix Salmon takes Henry Blodget to town over the Silicon Valley Insider’s mostly stupid advice on what to do with the New York Times.
How Not to Fix the New York Times - Finance Blog - Felix Salmon - Market Movers - Portfolio.com.
Over a year ago now, I wrote a piece called Welcome to the Radiohead Economy for Report on Business Magazine. In the piece I compared Radiohead’s experiment of putting In Rainbows online and asking for donations to the practice of farmers leaving an “honesty box” along with their corn at an unmanned roadside stand.
During my research for that piece I also learned about a cafe in Kirkland, Washington that has all the lovely espresso drinks and sandwiches you would expect at an upscale cafe, but no prices or cash register, just a locked honesty box patrons can drop money into.
Obviously this isn’t a system that would work everywhere, but any good salesman (or conman) will tell you that one of the best ways to get your customers (or victims) to trust you is to first show that you trust them. I wish that more businesses understood that.
That’s why I was so pleased to read this story from the UK about a hardware store in North Yorkshire that was left open on Boxing Day with no staff and just an honest box. The truly amazing thing about the story is not that people didn’t make off with all the goods, but how many notes of thanks were also received in the box. This is a great way to build a community of trust and I’m sure it will benefit this guy’s business for years to come.
An honesty box is a terribly civilized thing, and putting one out shows just how much you think about
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If you have enough extra money lying around it’s quite possible that you’ve already booked one of the seats on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, set to launch sometime in 2010. There are plenty of good reasons to get on board: the spirit of adventure, being among the first humans to slip the surly bonds of earth, and so on…
But perhaps the best reason to get a seat at the dawn of commercial space travel is so that you can experience it before it begins its long slide into becoming the same kind of life-sucking bureaucratic nightmare that air travel is today.
One of the saddest stories of the 20th century is the fate of air travel. In 1900 it was a dream, feverishly speculated upon, subject to all manner of Jules Verne imaginings; by 1999 it was a chore, a tedious, uncomfortable ritual undertaken in order to get from A to B.
That’s how Owen Hatherley starts a wonderful essay on the state of air travel over at the New Statesman. Much of the blame, in his view, belongs to the institution of the airport, which he describes as a “warren-like combination of the shopping mall and the high-security prison.” Fans of Douglas Adams, of course, cannot read any description of the airport and not immediately recall the famous opening lines of The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul.
It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, “as pretty as an airport.”
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk Airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.
They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.
Adams is describing Heathrow circa 1988, but it seems that not a lot has changed since then. Twenty years after the publication of Tea Time, here’s how Hatherley describes the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five.
Terminal Five is majestic: a thrillingly Constructivist space, with huge spans of glass and steel, open to the expanse of the surrounding airfield. Yet within weeks of opening, 28,000 bags were lost, and 500 flights cancelled. And to ensure that people milling around in limbo keep themselves busy spending money, the terminal only has 700 public seats. Today, amid the airline bankruptcies, an advert declares “Terminal Five is working”, as if we should be impressed.
Hatherley’s essay reviews two new books, Naked Airport, a cultural history of “the world’s most revolutionary structure” by Alastair Gordon and Politics at the Airport, a collection of academic essays edited by Mark B. Salter of the University of Ottawa. Both sound like they are worth a read.
The title of Gordon’s book comes from a quote by Le Corbusier who apparently said “the airport should be naked”, and suggested placing them in the middle of cities, like railway stations, without any thought given to the logistics of actually landing planes or allowing them to take off.
When it comes to air travel, it seems, cold hard realities have always gotten in the way of big dreams. Today it is the economic realities of air travel that are truly destroying the fantasy of flying around the globe. Rising oil prices, deregulation and the emergence of discount carriers have thoroughly democratized the experience. Leaving aside the ecological problems of air travel, it is a wonderful thing that anyone can afford to do it, it’s just a shame that it is no more exciting than riding the bus and, because of security worries, a whole lot more hassle.
If commercial space travel ever becomes a useful way to get around, rather than just a novelty for the wealthy, it is inevitable that the same thing will happen to it. So, if you have the means, gather ye space miles, while ye may.
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One of the most widely discussed studies of the last year was a paper that claimed that people who were exposed to the Apple logo displayed more creativity than people who were exposed to the IBM logo. The study, which came out of the University of Waterloo and Duke University, also reported that people who were exposed to the Disney logo behaved more honesty than people who were exposed to E!.
The idea behind all of this is a psychological phenomenon known as “priming.” There have been a number of interesting studies in this field. People who have been exposed to words associated with rudeness have been observed to behave more rudely than those who were not, and people exposed to the elderly have shown a tendency to move slower and display poorer memory. Essentially, if we have a strong enough association between a symbol and a particular behaviour, it seems that we are more likely to display that behaviour ourselves. So, because the idea that Apple is associated with creativity has been so efficiently drilled into us, our brains are now primed for creative work when we see that logo.
Makes sense. This is, after all, how marketers hope branding works. By associating themselves with particular traits or activities they build a connection between their symbol and the things that activity represents. Apple products don’t actually have to do anything with their design or function that helps us be creative, all Apple has to do is associate the notions of “creativity” and “Apple” enough times and our brains take care of the rest. This is the essence of their branding strategy. I suspect the same is true of “Axe Body Spray” and “sex” or “Budweiser” and “sex” or “Porsche” and “sex”.
The real goal for marketers, however, is build a connection between their product and the behaviour of “buy this,” and I’m not certain that goal is being achieved by any of these branding efforts. If having an Apple poster on my wall while using a Windows machine has the same effect on my creativity as using an Apple product, then why bother laying out the extra cost of buying Apple? In fact, if priming is so effective, why not just put up posters of our creative heroes, images we associate even more deeply with the sort of work we want to produce, than some corporate logo? Perhaps the notion of filling our rooms with the icons we adore, as so many of us did when we were in high school, is a brilliant way of influencing our behaviour.
The idea of sympathetic magic is deeply ingrained in cultures throughout the world. From lucky talismans to superstitious rituals, to the habit of collecting items that were once possessed by famous people, or eating the hearts of our enemies to absorb their life force, humans have long history of connecting symbols with outcomes. We can scoff at the idea of prehistoric man throwing spears at cave paintings of deer in the hopes that it would magically provide them with a more successful hunt, but as an early form of priming this makes perfect sense. By associating the ritual and the image with the actual hunt, perhaps the brains of our ancestors were better prepared for action when they saw deer on the plains.
So, thanks Apple for creating a symbol we can associate with creative work. It reminds me that I should get a picture of Don Delillo to put above my desk.
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Robert N. Charette at IEEE Spectrum has a terrific interview with James Boyd, Singapore Airlines’ vice president of public relations for the Americas, about the thinking and psychology that goes into the design of Singapore Airlines’ customer experience.
Below are some of the highlights.
On the In-flight entertainment system:
In-flight entertainment is not just about providing you with music and movies; it also fits into the psychology of how we create a satisfied passenger. This is a business where consumers who are used to having a tremendous amount of control in their lives have to give up most of that sense of control.
Airlines tell you when you have to come to the airport, when you can board, when the aircraft is going to leave, how long it’s going to be aloft, and when you can get out of your seat, and that creates an enormous amount of stress for passengers. From a psychological perspective, we use the IFE system as a means of providing almost the illusion of control for the passenger.
If you can start, stop, pause, and rewind from a broad slate of options, it gives you something very specific to do. More important than that, it gives you a way to exercise control over your environment. We find that that is a really critical tool for helping to create a more satisfied passenger.
On the sommelier service:
The primary benefit of the wine program and the sommelier training our cabin crew go through is in creating a credible point of interaction between the passengers and the crew. You can have a discussion about the wine, we can set up a little impromptu tasting for you, or our cabin crew can speak intelligently from an educated perspective about what it is that they’re pouring and why this might be a better selection for the meal you selected from the menu.
So those few moments of credible, appropriate interaction between the cabin crew and the passenger are basically built around the “prop” of wine. Obviously, it’s important that we serve quality wine, because it supports the brand, et cetera, but in the same way that the entertainment system helps create a satisfied passenger by giving them control over their experience, the wine program creates that point of interaction that makes people feel that they have been looked after in a credible way.
In contrast, my understanding is that at Air Canada, they use an in-depth psychlogical study to determine exactly how rude and incompetent they can be before customers snap, then they back off from that line just a little bit.
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