Influential Marketing Blog

Steve Jobs And The 4 Counterintuitive Business Strategies Of Apple

One of the most legendary stories about Zappo's famed culture of customer service above all else is their longstanding business practice of paying people to quit. It is a perfect example of the power of counterintuition - that offering an incentive to leave will actually help you get rid of employees who would have lacked commitment and likely developed into underperforming employees in the long term. Counterintuition is like that. It takes something that initially seems crazy and illogical and flips it into a business strategy for success.

Perhaps no other company in recent memory has been quite as good at applying counterintuition to running their business as Apple. It is simultaneously a source of frustration for their competitors and confusion for business analysts why Apple is able to do business in a way that would surely be toxic for many other brands if they were to adopt the same closed approach to ecosystem, partners and social media.

Over the last week, media has iconized Steve Jobs and his impact on Apple and even humankind. Among the daily individual tributes are stories people share from their moments of meeting Steve Jobs and how Apple under his watch has become a master brand at using counterintuition to become the exception to nearly every rule in business. I have written before about the "real secret of Apple's success" ... but this week I have been thinking about some of their most counterintuitive business practices and what we all might learn from them. Here are a few to consider:

1. Control the uncontrollable. If you had to name one thing that has helped Apple get to where they are today, it is that they control more aspects of their product development, distribution, sales, marketing, usage and service than any other technology manufacturer. They have their own stores, a locked down software platform and ecosystem, no open standards, integrated product service, and exacting brand standards for how their brand is to be mentioned in any context. They rarely offer media access into the company and are notoriously guarded about anything they allow to be shared about their products or company. Elements that many other brands would consider "uncontrollable" are meticulously micromanaged and centrally controlled by Apple. As a result, they can reduce any potential for a negative customer experience because they have more control over the entire journey.
2. Forget the low end. Apple could never be accused of acknowledging that there has been a global recession. Their products are consistently and unapologetically for the "high end" and they are widely admired for their discipline as a company in making sure they are not producing too many products or compromising on quality in any way. In one story, Nike CEO Mark Parker recalled advice Steve Jobs gave him about Nike: "Nike makes some of the best products in the world--products that you lust after, absolutely beautiful stunning products. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff, and focus on the good stuff." Apple has consistently done that, and charged a premium for it.
3. Use partnership as a last resort. Apple is well known for controlling their communications and dictating what their partners are (and are not) allowed to say publicly about working with Apple. More than that, Apple's first thought in most situations is how they can complete an element of their product or sales and distribution internally rather than having to partner with anyone. While some other organizations see partnership as an opportunity, Apple uses it as a last resort when they have no other options.
4. Obsess over the little things. Generally, if you ask most people in business they will describe micromanagement as a bad thing. No one wants a manager who is always looking at every little detail - yet most accounts of working with Steve Jobs describe him as the sort of leader who stresses about such trivialities as font kearning and slight shade variations of yellow. This unwavering attention to detail translates into unique well thought out products, and it offers yet another argument for why, as my fellow Ogilvy colleague Rory Sutherland suggests in his brilliant TEDx talk, every company should have a Chief Detail Officer focused on "sweating the small stuff."

 

What You Can Learn From The Failure of DVORAK

In 1932 the Carnegie Foundation gave a grant to a Professor at Washington State University to develop the design for the ultimate keyboard. They had good reason to try – as study after study showed that the “QWERTY keyboard” (as it was commonly known) had a terribly inefficient design ever since it was patented back in 1878. 

The QWERTY keyboard was originally meant to offer a solution to the problem of keys sticking together on a typewriter by slowing typing down. The most commonly used letter combinations were placed further apart. The layout of the letters followed no intuitive logic. As a result, it worked for a short period – and solved the problem of sticking keys with an intentionally illogical and inefficient design.

Over time, however, the typewriter technology just got better and it caused Professor August Dvorak to think that in 1932 that the world needed a better design. So with his grant, he invented the DVORAK keyboard. It had a much more efficient design that placed the most commonly used letters in the middle row within easy access. You could now type the 400 most common words in the English language just with the middle row (you could only do 100 on the old QWERTY). The fastest typist in the world, Barbara Blackburn even set a world record of 212 words per minute on a DVORAK keyboard.

Yet we all know how this story ended – Dvorak lost the fight against QWERTY. The DVORAK keyboard design was never adopted on a mainstream, because nearly anyone who had to type had already learned how to use the inefficient system of the QWERTY keyboard at fast speeds and was unwilling to learn a new system. It was faster, easier and better to use the inefficient old solution than the newer, more efficient and clearly superior alternative.

Years later, I still use this example as a powerful reminder to any entrepreneur that sometimes having the best or most efficient solution isn’t the most important thing. There are old habits to break and biases to unlearn. Getting someone to change a learned behavior on anything from choosing one particular vendor or buying a certain type of product requires understanding what you are really up against.

Professor August Dvorak underestimated how much affinity people had for their inefficiently designed QWERTY keyboard. What kind of existing affinity that your customers have are you underestimating? Answering this question can be the first step in avoiding failure and making sure you are not fighting a hopeless cause.

7 Ways to Revamp Your Online Registration Form

A bad online registration form online has sadly become as American as apple pie. The vast majority of them collect useless information, present an annoying barrier to engagement and generally are reviled by anyone who is unlikely enough to have to fill one out online. For the amount of pain involved, you would think the benefits would be life altering.  When you fill out the long registration form before a first doctor’s visit, the up side is that you should get better and more informed treatment that won’t unintentionally kill you. Online registration forms rarely have a comparable benefit.

Of course, we all want to build our lists of people who might buy our stuff. Online registration forms, in general, are meant to capture those types of leads and build the almighty customer database that we all want to have, whether we know what to do with it or not. The basic question you need to ask at the end of it is how much of the information you are currently collecting are you really using for anything that helps your business?  The unfortunate reality is that you are probably collecting lots of information you don’t need, and missing out on some of the most valuable information that you should be asking for.

Here are 5 tips on how you might be able to revamp your online registration form to give you more valuable information, get more people to actually fill it out and use it not just as a way to build your database, but also to get more insights about your potential customers.

1. Understand your abandonment rate. The first question you should ask before you even start to revamp your form is what is your “abandonment rate?” Put simply, this is the difference between the number of people who visit your form page and view it, and those who actually fill it out and submit it. Understanding, for example, that only 1 out of 50 people who visit your contact us form actually fill it out gives you a starting point to improve on.
2. Separate form functions. The problem with having one form for everyone is that the information you might ask a current customer for is different from what you might as a potential customer, or a local journalist who wants to profile your business, or a partner/vendor who might want to work with you. Consider having different forms where you can tailor your questions to those audiences.
3. Include optional questions. Does every question on your form really require an answer? Doing this, you end up with a list of questions that may make your form too much work. Instead, consider the questions that you really need answered and make the rest optional.
4. Kill your irrelevant questions. Are you asking for a phone number that you don’t need or a mailing address when you never mail anything to your customers? Forget the “standard” fields of a online form and think about what you really want to know.
5. Always ask for a blog or Twitter URL. The one fundamental truth about anyone who has built up any kind of audience online through a blog or on a tool like Twitter is that they are usually more than happy to share their social media prowess with you. Give them a field on a form where they can tell you just how important their social network is and you will almost always get a response.
6. Give them multiple options to be contacted. Most of us prefer a certain form of contact, and even though we might volunteer our email address and phone number – what we really want is for you to only email us and NEVER to call. Try to capture that information and you will be one step ahead of your competitors.
7. Ask how they found you. How will you know if your online marketing is working unless you get a sense from your potential leads of how they found you? Make sure to always ask if someone came to your site from online search, or seeing a billboard, or a referral, or any other way that you might be promoting your business. Knowing the answer to this question will help you to make better marketing decisions in the future.

This post is republished from the original article I wrote for the American Express Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog (though sometimes I'm a day late!) - a featured series on ideas and marketing techniques for small businesses.

To read more articles like this, visit the "Small Business Friday" category on this blog.

The Agony Filter

There is a new travel website called Hipmunk that has an interesting philosophy about searching for the best flight deal online. Instead of showing you every flight combination that could save you an extra $12, they remove options that no normal human would choose. Sure you could save some money by taking two connections to get from DC to Boston – but you would end up spending 16 hours in airports to save a miniscule amount of money. We all know that no one would choose to do that, but somehow that option still presents itself on almost any other travel site that you might search.

Hipmunk calls this feature their “agony filter” – but the benefits of something like this go far beyond just the online travel booking space. Imagine if you had an agony filter for your small business. Or a way of removing those options that you might currently be offering which no one really chooses. Or those which are not at all beneficial to your business. Here are three ways that using something like an agony filter could help you make your small business more pain-free for your customers.

1. Reduce your choices. All you have to do is stand in front of the toothpaste isle in a supermarket to be reminded of how complex the world that we live in actually is. The power of an agony filter is that someone (or their technology) is taking the time to somehow curate the options that are immediately provided to a customer. The result of this is that you can reduce that initial moment of being overwhelmed and often make it more likely that someone will actually move ahead and take your desired action.
2. Create more useful filtering options. Are you really letting someone see the different ways of working with you in the way that they most care about? The most common way for any small business to describe different levels of working with them is through cost or actual deliverables. If you have a retail destination, perhaps you focus on your location. What about how long you take to fulfill your services? Or your relative experience within a particular industry? The point is, you may not be sure of the exact one or two criteria that your potential customers making their decision based on, so make it easier for them to filter out the things that they don’t care about.
3. Get rid of your worst loss leaders. The idea of a loss leader is a common one: offer someone at a below market price to get a customer in the door and then you can make more profit over them in the long term. The problem is that sometimes those loss leaders might be causing you a particular kind of agony … the agony of giving away too much for free. Instead of continuing to do it, consider how you might replace (or get rid of) some of those types of deals that your small business is using and instead focus on those which have real value for your business.

This post is republished from the original article I wrote for the American Express Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog (though sometimes I'm a day late!) - a featured series on ideas and marketing techniques for small businesses.

To read more articles like this, visit the "Small Business Friday" category on this blog.

The Magic Button: Finding The Real Secret Formula For Social Media

Let me tell you a secret I don't often share: I have a magic social media button. This button has only one special power: when I press it, I can immediately give you a million fans, followers or friends. You can choose whether you want this instant audience on Twitter or Facebook or some other site. They would have no cost to you, and you would have all of them overnight. The only catch is that they are from completely random regions and demographics - and I can offer you no guarantee if they know anything about your business at all.

Would you ask me to push that button? More importantly, if I did offer you a million new fans overnight - what would you do with them? Everytime I ask this question, I'm greeted with a similar silence. See, the problem with the math here is that I'm giving you a truckload of UNQUALIFIED followers to your page. For all you know, I might be offering a million steak lovers as new followers for your vegetarian restaurant. Good luck using Facebook to convince them to give up their steaks and go for tofu instead.

Ok, by now you've probably realized that I don't actually have that magic button - but the premise isn't so silly. Everyday business owners challenge their marketing teams to build fan bases to reach as big a number as possible. So they turn to promotions and short term incentives. Like our page for a chance to win a vacation. Follow us on Twitter and we'll give 10 cents to the charity of your choice. Who cares what you like, if you care about our brand or if you might ever actually buy anything from us?

Playing the volume game is setting yourself up for failure. Instead, you need to focus all of your efforts on two big things:

1. Passion - how much do you love us, our products, our people or your experience with our business?
2. Influence - what is the size of your network and how many people pay attention to your opinion?

Those two elements are the real secret formula behind social media. When you have them both, all sort of good things happen. People talk to other people. Engagement is high. Customer satisfaction, and more importantly, customer delight goes through the roof.  If you're looking for a formula for success in social media, that's it.  It might not be as easy as a magic button - but it is certainly not complicated.

3 Ways To Fight The Small Business Inferiority Complex

Let’s not pretend you don’t know what this post is going to be about. Anyone who has worked in or run a small business has felt the ugly sting of an inferiority complex to their larger rivals at some point. Sure, having your own business is liberating and rewarding and life changing. But sometimes it would be nice to get the corporate card back and walk into a new business opportunity knowing without a doubt that everyone in the room had already heard of your company.

Of course, that’s an overly rosy picture of what it is like to work for a large company – but you get the picture. The thing is, when it comes to this inferiority complex that many small business owners and employees might feel, it typically only comes down to three things: perceived lack of size, perceived lack of experience, and perceived lack of resources. The irony of each of these is that what is holding you back from confidence in your own business in each area is probably the same thing that is making that issue a barrier for your business in the first place.

The good news about that is that if you can address this question for your potential customers, you can likely solve it for yourself and your staff as well. Let’s tackle each of them one by one:

How To Fight Perceived Lack Of Size

When it comes to fighting this perceived lack of size, there are only really two strategies you can employ:

1. Pretend to be bigger than you are. This is not about lying. The default assumption for most customers, however, is that you business is composed of more than just yourself … so a big part of this is to avoid doing anything to change that assumption. Of course, you can also bring on shorter term partners or advisors who are not really “on staff” but do enough to be part of your business.
2. Make size the enemy. The second and often better strategy is to make size the very reason why a customer might choose to work with you instead. You can offer more personalized attention, you are not faceless, you are locally located, and your flatter structure means they get more high quality service.

How To Fight Perceived Lack Of Experience

When a customer perceives that your small business may lack experience, they are typically focused on the expertise of your staff.

If you have only been in business for a short time, the perception of your experience will often come from the date of your founding … as if no one in your business was doing anything relevant before that date. The reality, of course, is that you and your staff were likely already working in whatever field your business happens to be in for many years before you started your business … so if you can demonstrate that you can get past this perception.

How To Fight Perceived Lack Of Resources

When it comes to experience in doing the type of work a customer requires, sometimes a customer’s objection will come down to one of scale of resources. “Sure you have delivered 100 widgets for your smaller customers, but we need 1000 widgets – can you really handle that volume?” This is a harder objection to address, but you need to show either through increased staff or production that even though you haven’t done a larger volume order yet … you are prepared to handle it.

This post is republished from the original article I wrote for the American Express Open Forum website. It is part of "Small Business Friday" on this blog - a featured series on ideas and marketing techniques for small businesses.

To read more articles like this, visit the "Small Business Friday" category on this blog.

How To Use The F-Word Strategically (And Why You Should)

I am not usually a fan of curse words. As a Dad with two young boys, I've especially become very conscious of them as I try desperately to help my oldest make it to his seventh birthday without trying it out in conversation. We're just a few weeks away.

Still, for some time I've been thinking that it may have an underestimated value when it comes to marketing. The first time I thought about this was when reading about a wonderful social marketing campaign from Saatchi and Saatchi that was done close to 20 years ago. It was for an organization fighting childhood hunger on the streets in Canada (I think) and as the ad featured visuals of young homeless boys on the street just trying to survive, the following voice-over of a boy's voice came on:

    "If I said I'm hungry, that probably wouldn't bother you."
    "If I said f*ck, it probably would."
    "F*ck, I'm hungry."

Those three simple lines stuck with me. At once they were a sad reminder of how desensitized we can get from the real issues in our world, and how we tend to focus our attention on the wrong things. The ad came back to me last week as I watched the online firestorm and conversation erupt from a single tweet sent by prolific blogger (and frequent agitator) Jeff Jarvis.

The tweet, in response to watching some of the posturing and deadlock in the recent "conversation" from politicians in Washington around the debt ceiling was short and emotional:

"Hey, Washington assholes, it's our country, our economy, our money. Stop fucking with it." (@jeffjarvis)

At the suggestion of one responder on Twitter, he then shortened the sentiment to a hashtag (#fuckyouwashington) which took off (read a great curated version of the full story on Storify). Over the next few days, the sentiment led to hundreds of thousands of retweets, interviews with mainstream media, and some backlash and indignation from DC-residents who took issue with the tweets directed at their entire city instead of just the politicians.

In a followup blog post aptly titled "No one owns a hashtag" - Jarvis shared why profanity was such a necessity though it may have offended some:

"Some wanted me to clean up the hashtag because it offended them. But as I tweeted in response, #dagnabbitwashington would not have had the same impact. It was the profanity about profane politics that made it take off, I believe."

His conclusion was the same one that led one of the world's largest advertising agencies to use the same profanity as a wake up call to resensitize an audience to the importance of a serious issue like childhood hunger. The big conclusion from both examples is a truth that perhaps we too often forget ... sometimes there is simply no substitute for a well placed f-bomb.