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Double helix

Three apples. Three myths. Each more powerful than the other. The first was Eve’s apple, the Biblical tale which is said to have scripted mankind. The second was Issac Newton’s defining moment, whichdetermined gravity and inspired generations of school-kids. The third is a logo which is reborn at regular intervals, setting new benchmarks for user interface.

The myth of the apple survives. But it’s the corporate apple that is now spawning a whole new tribe of buyers by redrawing the rules of customer satisfaction.If you trawl through cyberspace today, you will find bloggers biting just one apple — the brand that gave them the Mac, the iPod, and now the iPhone. True, 31-year-old Apple has had failures before, like the Cube, but nobody wants to remember them anymore. For, Apple has turned consumers into iLoyalists by breaking conventions in design and fashion. And, with the iPhone, it is all set to pass technology’s toughest tests: convergence and user-friendliness.

For, the $500-600 iPhone is not just a phone: it’s iPod + camera + video + browser + PDA. Its touch screen turns convergence into child’s play: a finger pinch and a finger spread allow you to zoom in and zoom out, and a finger flip allows you to run through the photogallery. This is not just a tech inflection point; it’s a reflection of Apple’s innate understanding of what tomorrow’s customer desires.

Which brings us to the discipline of customer satisfaction. Just-launch-it Apple has always dared to ask: What lies beyond customer satisfaction and how do we own it? Customer delight, a favourite talking point of management gurus, just can’t pinpoint what Apple has been doing since it first exposed the computer buyer in 1984 to GUI: graphical user interface. With GUI (buttons that allow you to go places on a computer), technology took a marketing leap. It allowed tech companies to speak the language of user-experience effortlessly. Thus was born usability, the ultimate bond between the product and the buyer. That relationship has become the key test for gadgets and gizmos.

Clearly, it is usability, the sheer ease and thrill of using brainy products, which has allowed Apple to delight customers. By doing so, Apple threatens to take customer satisfaction to the next level: customer orgasm. But customer orgasm is just an idea. Can companies execute it again and again, with newer and newer thrills? And can such a level ever be attained? Well, Apple is slowly getting there. If the iPhone succeeds, it could be the only company to have redefined and upgraded customer delight — a relationship that has become a given in today’s marketplace. Significantly, it would mean that Team Jobs has created a pipeline that rolls out magic year after year.

Until recently, it was Sony’s amazing wizardry that mesmerised markets. If the Walkman created a cult, the Playstation became a religion. A product of intuition and anticipation, the Walkman was ahead of the curve. And, with its runaway success, it became a symbol of innovation.

But while Sony has focused on technology, Apple has carefully aimed at cutting-edge design. For Apple, technology was a given; it was design, and how the customer interacted with it, which was far more important.

Apple’s achievement comes from a carefully nurtured culture of excellence. It’s an insane mix of talent, risk, imagination and timing. As Tom Peters describes it in The Circle Of Innovation: “For his product development teams Jobs hires individuals with ‘intriguing backgrounds’ and ‘extraordinary taste’ — for example, artists, poets, and historians. Their magic, according to Jobs: they have exposed themselves to ‘the best things humans have done and then brought those things into their projects’. Jobs’ original Macintosh team, for instance, was a marvelous mix of artists and engineers. Their aesthetic interests were as strong as their techie interests…”

But it was not aesthetics that prompted Steve Jobs to ask Pepsi CEO John Sculley that immortal question: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?” It was attitude. Or the irreverence that Apple disguises as design. It’s also the ring-tone of the iPhone.

Email: vinaykamat@dnaindia.net