Everyone is in a hype about the iPhone Launch - we already see the pictures of people queuing in front of the Apple stores in order to be the first to receive their brand new iPhone. While all the hype is about the phone itself and whether it is good or not I want to take a step back and look at the big picture of this iPhone launch.

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:

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While doing research for a workshop I stumbled over an amazing video and audio recording about an AOL customer who wants to cancel his account, but unfortunately he is not allowed to. The call center agent strictly follows the script of his AOL Customer Retention Manual and gets it horribly wrong.

Unfortunately for AOL, the guy who is cancelling his account made a recording of this call. Here it is (transcripted version):

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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.

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