I am halfway through Steve Jobs’s biography, “Steve Jobs: A Biography,” by Walter Isaacson, and up to this point in the book, Jobs mentions numerous successes: the Macintosh, Pixar, NeXT, iPod, iTunes, Apple Stores. You might argue that they all did not dominate their respective market space, but you have to give credit to the sheer number of products and ideas that he and Apple launched. Did you know that the industry predicted that iTunes would sell one million songs in the first six months? They sold one million songs in the first six days.
The Apple Store was ridiculed by numerous industry and business leaders, including Apple board member Ed Woolard, who is quoted as saying, “Gateway has tried this and failed, while Dell is selling direct to consumers without stores and succeeding.”
The New York Apple store on Fifth Avenue generates more traffic and sales per square foot than any other store in New York City. The Apple Fifth Avenue Store attracted 50,000 visitors a week in the first year. Gateway averaged 250 visitors a week. The Apple Store grosses more per square foot than any store in the world. And it grosses more in total absolute dollars than any store in New York City, including Saks Fifth Avenue and Bloomingdale’s.
The list goes on.
In the book, Jobs attributes his great success to one consistent theme – the coming together of art/product design and technology. Jobs was involved in every minute detail of every product – the color, the layout of the circuit boards. How white is white on the iPod? Should the headphones be standard black, or should they be white? Where should the marble come from for the floors of the stores? What color should the marble be?
Jobs and his staff worked for over a year on a full-scale prototype store, built in a warehouse, before they even decided to move forward. Asked Jobs:
“How will our customers use our products? If we put ourselves in our customer’s place we cannot help but develop great useable products. The iPod was wildly successful and changed the music industry forever because it is a product we built for ourselves. Once we loved the product we knew our customers would.”
So what lesson can we pull from Jobs’s strategy for not only Antenna but for all industry leaders? A challenge for each of us to build products that customers cannot live without. Products that customers will brag about. Products that will transform their jobs and daily lives. If we take the care and effort and attention to detail that Steve Jobs and his team have taken, we cannot help but be successful.
Tags: Business To Employee, Jim DeSocio, Steve Jobs
