'Why hating the iPhone is good for your business'

Apple won’t let me change my battery. Sometimes at the end of the day I run out of juice and can’t get to a charger. With another phone I pop out the battery and slip in a new one. Takes about 10 seconds. Apple has sealed the iPhone so I can’t do this.

When I travel to a new country I always use a local sim card. I like to be able to easily change the card in my phone. With iPhone I have to hunt around for a paper clip to open the phone, and then find scissors to cut the sim card to a mini sim.

Apple wants to choose what size my phone is, what size the screen is, in fact, everything about the phone is predetermined. Samsung gives me choices. I like to choose.

Where did Google Maps and YouTube go? They are not on the new iPhone nor on old phones after you have installed the latest software upgrade. Oh, that’s right. Apple is having a fight with Google so they are taking Google products off. Have you tried the iPhones new map app? It relocated the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco by 5 kilometres, the Star Ferry in Hong Kong, put the train station in Auckland in the ocean and eliminated the international airport in Washington DC.

The phone drops calls. All the time. 

They give you useless earbuds which no one likes, and don’t give you the converter plug you now need to dock your new phone with all the peripheral equipment you bought.

And don’t get me started on the computer mouse, which has no right click because Steve Jobs thought people were too stupid to figure it out. I like to right click.

I am not trying to kill Apple. It is possibly the most successful company around today and its stock price continues to soar. But the iPhone is losing ground to Android phones; in the last quarter Android had a 68 per cent global smart phone market share of 68 per cent – Apple had 17 per cent. It may be useful to understand why.

All of the above points demonstrate a lack of consumer sensitivity. Bottom line, Apple doesn’t listen or respond to their customers as well as they should. Steve Jobs famously said he never spoke with consumers or paid attention to market research.

If you are Steve Jobs, or you employ one in your company, then Great! Ignore customers and do what you want. You are a genius and you deserve to do whatever you want.

But if you are one of the thousands, if not millions, of other companies out there, who don’t have a genius on the payroll, then listening to customers and responding to their needs may be a very good thing to do.

Consumers have problems. Consumers have needs. By solving those problems and addressing those needs your company can succeed.

Many companies do this the other way around. They first create a product or service and then ask how do we convince consumers to buy us. This is wrong.

The correct way to build a business is to first talk with your potential customers, be they current customers, new customers, or rejecters. Find out what they want. Then, design your product or service to deliver. People want to buy a product designed for them.

I am working now with one company that launched a new product without talking to consumers. They came up with the wrong product, the wrong pricing, the wrong positioning and the wrong distribution. Everything they did was wrong, but they executed the wrong strategy very well. After doing consumer research, I was able to convince them that they needed to start over from the beginning. An expensive mistake, but they may be on the right track now.

In Myanmar recently I met with a man who runs a very successful company. He is afraid of international competition and wanted to hire my company to develop a new strategy for him. I asked him what he knew about his customers. After a long pause he replied that he knew nothing about them.

I may not get the job, but if I do, I will know where to start.

If, like me, you do not use an iPhone, ask yourself why. Probably because you found something that fits your needs better. Use that same logic to address the products or services your company sells. Listen to the consumer and your business will grow.

 

Eric Rosenkranz (www.ethree-asia.com) runs a strategic advisory in Southeast Asia assisting existing companies as well as start-ups to develop their long-term strategy and achieve success in their business.