Tag Archives: Apple

Make fewer products, but make them great

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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.

The Dread Pirate Steve Jobs

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I’ve been slacking off on maintaining this blog for the last month. It’s the time of the year where malaise and post-nasal drip seem to colour everything. I have a lot of ideas for posts and have a build-up of interesting stuff that I’ve come across in the last couple of weeks that I’d like to share, I just need a kick-start to get me in the habit of posting here again.

Thankfully, my latest Big Idea is out in Report on Business Magazine today, so reprinting it here gives me an easy way to start posting again. Next month’s Big Idea is about how computer models led to the downfall of AIG.

The Dread Pirate Jobs

What do today’s celebrity CEOs have in common with 17th-century pirates? A fearsome affinity for branding, for one

KEN HUNT

From Friday’s Globe and Mail

November 25, 2008 at 7:00 AM EST

Drawing parallels between pirates and modern business is a popular pastime these days, and not just because a ragtag cast of Somali free-booters lucked into capturing more than two dozen Russian tanks earlier this year. In the past 18 months, a raft of books and articles have emerged arguing that, contrary to the half-crazed sea dogs portrayed by the likes of Johnny Depp, real pirates of the Caribbean made rational, intelligent business decisions, based on their dual goals of maximizing revenues and keeping down costs.

One of the men responsible for this explosion was Peter Leeson, an economist at George Mason University. In The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, his new book being released this spring, he contends that the world of 18th-century pirates—their business practices, social contracts and even the mythology that surrounds them—was more sophisticated than anyone previously assumed. Not only were pirates great managers, he says, they were experts at branding, developing some of the strongest and most consistent trademarks of all time.

“They wanted to avoid violence as much as possible,” says Leeson. After all, conflicts were costly. Crew members might be harmed in a fight, their ship could be damaged or, worse, they might destroy the ship they were attacking. “Pirates wanted other ships to give up without a fight. One way to do that is to have a reputation that is so heinous it’s scary.” A great example of this was the Jolly Roger flag, “one of the most memorable corporate logos in history,” says Leeson. That the skull and crossbones persists today, on T-shirts and books and candy bars, “is an incredible testament to the power of pirate branding.” The flag’s message is a simple one: Resist us, and you will be slaughtered.

The pirate brand didn’t stop at a winning logo. We know that pirates like Edward Teach, otherwise known as Blackbeard, actively worked on their personal images. “They looked a certain way and they had a particular reputation, and they cultivated that to the greatest extent possible because they understood the benefits it generated for them,” Leeson says. Blackbeard actively encouraged the worst rumours about his methods of torture and his sanity. He was so universally feared that, to this day, there are no verified accounts of his actually having to resort to murder—most of his victims submitted without a fight.

What does this mean for business today? While corporations can’t resort to threats of violence to get deals done, a reputation for hostility is as valuable as ever. The Recording Industry Association of America is an example of this: Its reputation for aggressive litigation (suing little girls and grandmothers with equal vigour) is designed to discourage illegal file-sharing. Likewise, Wal-Mart’s reputation for undercutting the competition causes many small businesses to simply roll over when it moves into town. Whether the business is privateering or private equity, “consistency is important for a message to become institutionalized,” Leeson notes. To many small business owners, Wal-Mart’s smiling yellow happy face is as scary as the skull and crossbones ever was.

But what happens when a company has so intrinsically linked its fearsome reputation to the personality of its captain? In the case of Apple, the company owes much—if not all—of its talent for bending others to its will to an enfant terrible CEO, Steve Jobs. Even within the company, the notoriously authoritarian chief is viewed as “a terror-inspiring taskmaster who’s forever screaming at his workers,” as Wired editor Leander Kahney wrote in his book Inside Steve’s Brain. How does a company ever crawl out from under that cult of personality?

Maybe it doesn’t have to. In the movie The Princess Bride, the black-clad hero Westley made his fortune by assuming the identity of the Dread Pirate Roberts, the original having long since handed off his mask and retired a wealthy man in Patagonia. Now consider Apple: Rumours surrounding Steve Jobs’s health—fuelled by the fact that Bloomberg accidentally published a draft version of his obituary last October—have investors wondering what might happen to the company if he died. Perhaps Jobs’s persona, black mock turtleneck and all, could be passed on down the line, for the next plucky privateer to play Dread Jobs.

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Apple & Creativity: the Sympathetic Magic of Brands

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Image representing Apple Inc. as depicted in C...

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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