The Art of Einstein

Is Apple the new Ma Bell?

Judge Green and your Justice Department dismantled Ma Bell 28 years ago.  A lot of people thought it was about time.  Cigars were passed out on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange!             

But most Americans loved the telephone company.  She was dependable.  Customer service was off the charts.  The Operator answered in 2 rings and never uttered a discouraging word.  Employees were trained relentlessly to be courteous and helpful.  And Ma Bell was also a great place to work.  Remind you of anyone?

Dan Gilmor’s column in Salon the other day reminded me how my affection for my Apple devices parallels how most of us felt about the old phone company.  And how Apple has made being loved and admired as good a policy in the free-for-all 2010 marketplace as it was for a 20^th century regulated monopoly.

 From the very beginning Apple, like Ma Bell, has been a profoundly customer-centric organization.  They’ve understood that people, like an electric current, follow the past of least resistance.  In the wired world there wasn’t anything easier to use than a black telephone.  Today the unwired world nobody comes close to the iPhone and Appleware in general.

I’ve been researching android phones lately (strictly business) and am just stunned at the tower of Babel wireless has become.  Multiple handsets running multiple operating systems.  Multiple carriers with multiple service plans.  Fall in love with a phone and you often discover that the carrier who offers it doesn’t serve your area (happened to me).  Then please decide on how many minutes you want to buy, which talk, text, and data plans work for you.  Some phones are free - some cost hundreds of dollars.  And by the way, how many megapixels would you like on your phone’s camera!  The friction in this market is incredible.

Buying an iPhone, however, is as simple as “Good Night Moon”.  One carrier.  One OS.  Two phones.  And they’ll even teach you how to use it. 

Bingo!

 

 

 

  

Everyting I Need to Know About Marketing I Learned From Steve Jobs

 Ken  Segall and I had a long, chatty lunch a week or so ago.  Once upon a time Ken and I worked together at LGFE.  He’s been around tech advertising as a creative type for years - many of them spent working on Apple at Chiat Day.

            Jobs, he says, is passionate about keeping things simple - which dovetails in a way with a long ago lesson I learned from a New Yorker editor who, when I asked him what he did as an editor, replied “It’s very simple.”  “I am a surrogate for the reader.”  His job, in other words, was be sure that ideas, no matter how complicated, were easily understood.  He was a sort of customer advocate who made things simple, as Apple has been striving to make computing simple for as long as I can remember.

            Back in the era of green screens and DOS prompts, Apple borrowed the icons that had been developed at Xerox PARC and introduced them on Macintosh in 1984.  Suddenly using a personal computer became hugely simpler.  Microsoft saw the light and went to work developing Windows.

Oh How I Wish Again That I Was in Michigan - but especially Ann Arbor

Even though I'm a copywriter I’ve always been fussy about type, layout, readability, the sound-track, the voice-over and the message they send.  Because, the non-verbal components of a message really are the body language of a brand.

Some people do a superb job of getting it right.  IBM has a long history of obsessing about design, initiated by Thomas Watson Jr. who hired Paul Rand, Charles and Rae Eames, and other first rank designers to make sure everything about IBM looked better than the competition.    At Apple,  Steve Jobs, to his credit, has been a maniac about design and monitored the details for 30 years.  In both cases, attention to esthetics has paid off at the box office. 

However web designers, with few exceptions, seem to be lousy at body language.  I have loved the simplicity of Google’s landing page from day one.  Malcolm Gladwell’s site is also a treat.  Much of the rest looks like a dog’s breakfast. 

Which brings me to this week’s good news/bad news body language story.