The Sebinomics Blog 1.0

(Picture source: http://www.stenudd.com/aikido/images/dojo/Nishio.jpg)

As Miles Davis and other great music legends used to say, The Best Teacher Is The Stage!

I have been reading many books about marketing, branding, presentation skills, and customer relations, and I studied all of the above at different universities. Nevertheless, the best teacher has been the “stage” so far.

I am in my seventh week as an Apple solution consultant and have seen many different aspects of working very closely with an international brand. One very important aspect I had to learn the hard way is that successful brands always have fans and enemies. A dear friend of mine once told me that if you do not get any criticism you are not important!

Some Apple end-consumers felt very happy and enlightened after their experience at the Apple shop were I work, others gave me their emails for an exchange of ideas, and some end-consumer wanted to actually kick my butt (no kidding!) because they hated Apple. Please do not ask me why that was, I am still trying to forget that incident!

Another thing I have realized by now is that you cannot make your product appealing to everybody. Sometimes I (have to) tell people, who actually would like to buy a Mac, that it might not be the right product for them. The point here is that always when I tell them not to buy a Mac, most of them actually start wanting it even more!

I am more touched by the switchers, who do not have any idea what a Mac actually is and what it can do to spice up your creativity. Everyone who gives a “Ahhh!” and a “Wow!” after one of my presentations brings a little smile on my lips. And when they come back after buying a Mac with questions about how to go one step further with all those great applications included in the system, I get very enthusiastic and spend hours discussing ways to cut a movie on iMovie, create a song on GarageBand, and put it together to a podcast for the world to enjoy!

Something tells me that the best way to market a product is to be very, very honest about the brand. But more about this in my next blog entry.

I am reading Seth Godin’s “Small Is The New Big” and am enjoying the book a lot. The most important sentence I found in the book is,

“Marketing is a show, a form of entertainment designed to satisfy wants, not needs.“

I completely agree with this statement. Through my occupation as an Apple solution consultant, I have met many so-called switchers, people who change from PC to Mac, saying that they WANT to change from PC to Mac. They practically never say that they need to change from one system to the other. Of course these are the easiest customers for a salesperson, since there is no need to convince them about the benefits of switching to a Mac.

It is no secret that the most successful brands fulfill wants, not needs. Think about your experience at Starbucks. Do you really need to go to Starbucks to drink an overpriced coffee? You want to go to Starbucks for the experience they provide; comfortable ambient with cozy smooth jazz music in the air and a cup of coffee (not necessarily the best one, but that is not the point here) for one hour of relaxation. Or, think of Adidas All-Star shoes. Why should we pay three times as much for a pair of Adidas All Star shoes in stead of buying exactly the same model without the three stripes on the side? Well, the answer is easy: Because we WANT the All Star shoes, even though they don’t give us anything additional except emotional value, which is one of the most important arguments to justify our choice to spend way more money than we actually would have to.

What about design? What additional value do we receive if we buy a product that is inferior to another, is more expensive, but looks better? Well, we can brag about it. Think about sitting in the train or in a cafe and having a way cooler looking laptop than the person sitting in front of you. You might have spent one thousand dollars more for having a computer that does not work as fast or as stable than the other one, but you might feel superior. And, the quality might not be as good as the low-cost product.

Migros, a Swiss retailer, created a low-cost brand called “Budget”. Almost all Migros Budget products are way cheaper than from competitors. You can buy a 2-litre bottle of water for CHF 0.35, whereas you might be paying more than twice the price for an average brand. And, the Budget water does not taste cheaper at all! The funny thing is that Migros was great at creating the Budget brand and making it a “cult-brand”. Many people go to Migros and buy only Budget products where available. They save money, because the products are cheaper, they save time, because they don’t need to figure out which brand to choose, and they can trust Migros Budget to be a low-cost brand that provides good quality products. Migros Budget is becoming a lifestyle brand like Apple, Nike, and Starbucks.

It is true: Marketing is a show that satisfies wants. Create a story around your brand. Write a storyboard for the show you call your brand. Look at it as if it was a show on TV that has several episodes and a season finale. The first episode has to be a pilot, twice as long as a regular episode, that really catches your audience’s attention. Then you need to tighten the suspense to keep your target audience tuning in. In the middle of the season evaluate what your audience likes and dislikes, and adjust to the wants of your audience to come up with a tremendous season finale. I suggest, watch the first season of WB’s Dawson’s Creek, and you will know how a great writer as Kevin Williamson, who also wrote Wes Craven’s SCREAM-trilogy did it.

I was reading a ‘Newsweek’ article by Jonathan Alter and came across a 1976 statement by former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter:

“A government as good as its people.”

That was Mr Carter’s message, which is a great idea, and, if you exchange the word ‘government’ with ‘community’, is –or should be– the foundation of every community today, ranging from open source to corporations to cliques and so on.

Human resources are the most valuable force in a community. If they work on a product or a service, that product or service is just as good as the people who invent and/or maintain it. I am a big supporter of open source solutions and think that projects such as Wikipedia and Linux really show the power that an organized community has.

I say, if people with same interests work faithfully and organized together and do not try to trick each other, they will be able to create great things that attract the attention of others who want to be part of that community and support it to create even bigger things.

My message here is, “a community as good as its people!“

I have been working for Apple as a solution consultant for more than two months now and thought it would be good to know more about the company’s roots and read “iWoz” by Steve Wozniak, the guy who created the very first Apple computers. It really helped me to understand why certain things are done a certain way at Apple.

These are my favorite passages in ‘iWoz’:

“When you have an employee who says he’s tired of calculators and is really productive in computers, you should put him where he’s productive. Where he’s happy.” (p. 194)

“Hey, never pretend you can do someone’s job better than someone who’s been doing it for years.” (p. 232)

“[Most inventors] are almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them ‘are’ artists. And artists work best alone—best outside of corporate environments, best where they can control an invention’s design without a lot of other people designing it for marketing or some other committee.“ (p. 290)

“When you’re working as your own boss, making decisions about what you’re going to build and how you’re going to go about it, making trade-offs as to feature and qualities, it becomes a part of you. Like a child you love and want to support. You have huge motivation to create the best possible inventions—and you care about them with a passion you could never feel about an invention someone else ordered you to come up with. And if you don’t enjoy working on stuff for yourself—with your own money and your own resources, after work if you have to—then you definitely shouldn’t be doing it!” (p. 292)

I mostly agree with Mr Wozniak’s statements and think that every entrepreneur should think about the above-mentioned points. Mr Wozniak left Apple in 1985 because he did not fit into a corporate environment. Corporate Apple castigated his creativity, which is the worst thing for any entrepreneur. Creativity is what makes great products and ideas great. Creativity is the root of a corporation. It is not the product bringing in money; it is the idea that created the product! Therefore: Inventors of products and services, be creative! And, bosses and investors, let them be creative!