Everything started with the iPhone announcement on January 9th 2007 at the Macworld. Everyone remembers the great show that Steve Jobs gave us, and the horrible show we got to see from Cingular CEO Stan Sigman. (A wrap-up about their presentation style can be found at the Presentation Zen)

Check out Steve Jobs’ presentation:

And here is Stan Sigman’s presentation (starts at 4:50):

Then the expected hype set in which resulted in an amazing coverage of the iPhone as can be seen by this analysis from Valleywag. They performed an analysis about mentions of “iPhone” in the news which can be seen in the chart below (iPhone news mentions are shown in Black).

Reasons for this incredible hype are that:

• Everyone was speculating about the iPhone but Apple kept quiet
• The final product has blown away everyone and set expectations tremendously high
• Everyone was speculating whether Apple has set expectations too high with the iPhone
• and of course: because it’s Apple

From looking at this, here comes my….
Lesson 1:

Keep quiet until the latest possible moment then make the best product presentation you can. If someone questions whether your product can live up to its expectations – keep quiet.

PC World summarizes the iPhone Hype and The Washington Post analyzes what might happen if the iPhone can not live up to its expectations. The following picture shows clearly how high Apple has set the expectations with the iPhone. This is a collection of various “user-created” designs what the iPhone might look like. And we know the story: Apple has excelled these expectations with the iPhone’s technology and design.

Nobody knows how closely Apple was following these designs but you can be sure that if Steve Jobs ever saw one of these, he would have said: “Nice, but not enough”.

Which brings me to…

Lesson 2:

Listen to your customers expectations not just to meet their expectations but to exceed their expectations.

In one of my previous posts I was asking the polemic question if Apple is really that innovative and the key insight is that at the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether innovation comes strictly from within your organization or whether it is the result of “assembling” technology and knowledge to deliver a great product. The article that I was citing in the previous article was from Businessweek: Lessons from Apple.

An article in the International Herald Tribune titled “Who really makes the iPod” nails it why Apple earns $80 on each iPod. “Those clever folks at Apple figured out how to combine 451 mostly generic parts into a valuable product. They may not make the iPod, but they created it. In the end, that’s what really matters.” And you can be sure it is the same story with the iPhone.

Therefore my ….

Lesson 3:

Focus on a few things you are really good at and let others do the rest.

These are the lessons that I take away from looking at the iPhone launch. Did I miss anything? Then go ahead and leave a comment!

If you are interested in learning more about Apple and the concept of open innovation I recommend the following books:

• using information about its customers to determine the most important, highly valuable customers
• deploying dedicated employees whose task is to “monitor” these high value customers
• actively working to deliver a remarable customer experience by ensuring that their product or service offering is delivered in the best possible way

Here are Steve’s experiences:

Number 1:
Halfheartedly, I approached the counter and said that I had a seat on this plane, but it was probably long gone. The woman behind the gate, Carlene Boyd, replied, “Is your name Steve Levitt?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “I thought you might show up. So I saved your seat until the last second. Here it is, feel free to board.” I didn’t think to ask her why she thought I would show up so late. But that one simple act was enough to make me loyal to American Airlines until the end of time.

Number 2:
As I sat down to a dinner of fast food Chinese, my cell phone rang. The caller was a United Airlines employee named Michael. (Sorry, Michael, I can’t recall your last name.) He said, “I see that you’re at the airport and your flight is delayed a few hours. A seat opened up on an earlier flight, so I grabbed it for you in case you wanted it. It leaves in forty minutes, so you’ll have to hurry.”

His conclusion:
I have no illusions as to why American and United are nice to me: I travel way too much and they are the major airlines serving Chicago. I am a good customer. Still, compared to all the other things that airlines can do — serve warm nuts, show good movies, give a few inches of legroom — I would trade it all for a few more instances in which the airline does something out of the ordinary to get me home faster to see my wife and kids.

And this is exactly the point of remarkable experiences: doing something out of the ordinary makes your customers perform better (being at home with your kids earlier) and they will most probably come back next time they need your service.

Everybody likes to hear praise – from customers, from colleagues, from your boss or your spouse. It makes us feel good and confirms us in the actions we are doing. Nevertheless just listening to praise can be charming to your ego but it might not be enough.

The challenge is that in search for constant improvement, praise doesn’t lead to improvements because it doesn’t help you identify areas where improvement could lead to even better results. In your quest (or how Tom Peters calls it your “search of excellence”) to deliver an remarkable experience to your customers, listening to the customers’ praise won’t be of much help.

Even McDonalds has realized this – in order to improve their customer’s experience the company is closely tracking customer complaints and is identifying restaurants with a low number of complaints (their “brand builders”) and restaurants with high numbers of complaints (the “brand destroyers”).

In their report “Loud And Clear, The
Voice Of The Customer” they identified that their franchises in Hawaii enjoyed highest customer satisfaction rates while the lowest satisfaction rate was in Philadelphia. Through listening to their customers and their complaints they are now in a situation to pro-actively manage the customer experience in order to increase customer satisfaction in their “brand-destroyer” restaurants.

So it’s time to stop ignoring your customers and provide them means how they can communicate their complaints and you can be sure to find areas for improvement that will in the end lead to satisfied customers and increased sales for your business.

The full article in the Startup Journal of the Wall Street Journal can be found here.

However in the age of Web 2.0 and interest-specific global communities, companies are missing out one huge opportunity to tap into the collective knowledge of “the internet” and identify user requirements and needs that might lead to new service and product ideas.

One approach to identify these requirements is by screening relevant online communities and to identify trends, needs and solutions in a structured and organized approach. The German innovation company Hyve is specialicing in this area and has presented case studies and results of these “online community screening projects” at our workshop.

The results of these screening projects that have been presented are astonishing and the knowledge gained is sometimes to good to be true. Who would have thought that there are huge online communities on the topic of self-tanning lotion where user exchange ideas how to best apply the lotion (Ever had the idea to apply sun tanning lotion with an airbrush-like spraygun? Some bodybuilders do!) or how to mix your own self-tanning lotion. And this kind of knowledge can be found in every online community about aquarium, office decoration or model railways – all a company needs to do is start looking for it.

So in case you are reading this and you are looking for new ideas or expert knowledge in certain domains, maybe you should use Google to find a online community around this topic.