sitting at the cool kid's table 


The five rules of cool
By Harris Collingwood
Comment
December 13, 2005 - 12:00AM 
 
Almost since its founding in 1976, Apple Computer has enjoyed a prominence out of all proportion to its rather modest share of the personal computer market. That prominence can be measured by the attention lavished on the company's every move as well as every attempt to analyse its strategy and tactics. 
Consider the uproar from Macintosh purists when Apple launched its brief attempt to license its operating system to other hardware companies. When Apple reversed course and opted to keep its operating system to itself, another camp bellowed just as loudly. 
Whenever a journalist suggests that Apple might be something less than the most perfect organisation in recorded history, the poor sap is deluged with emails and phone calls from self-appointed "Mac Marines." 
The general perception of Apple as an exceptional entity rather than a profit-making enterprise is no accident. Apple's leaders have assiduously cultivated the image of a corporation that is hip, stylish, humane: the maker of "the computer for the rest of us," the company whose epochal 1984 advertisement promised a machine that would liberate humankind from the tyranny of large, impersonal computer companies. 
The effort has paid off handsomely. Despite some hooting and hollering on weblogs, the majority of the business press and the buying public don't seem to object when Apple, say, takes legal action against some of the biggest fans of its products. When Microsoft, for example, is accused of bullying its customers and rivals, or reverses itself in public, it's criticised in the mainstream press, flamed on online tech forums such as Slashdot, and sometimes even sued by usually laissez-faire antitrust enforcers. 
Similar accusations regarding Apple are ignored, minimised, or laughed off, while the company's earnings soar past Wall Street's expectations and iPods fly off the shelves at a rate of more than 6 million per quarter. It's as if the entire company has ingested some magical elixir that immunises it against bad publicity. Envious CEOs can only ask, "Where can I get some of that stuff?" 
Consider the reaction to the shorter-than-expected battery life that plagued some early iPods. Forrester research notes that a mere 12 per cent of iPod owners aren't satisfied with the device's battery life. Or consider the reaction of iTunes customers when RealNetworks launched a rival service. Did customers flee to Real, which offered them the freedom to use a wide array of music players? No. They stayed with Apple and its market-leading iPod/iTunes combo, even celebrating their captivity (iTunes is built to connect only with iPods). "I already had my choice, I chose Apple, I chose iPod, and I chose iTunes," said one post on a message board set up by RealNetworks. 
Such sentiments are the mark of a true believer in the Apple story. Harvard Business School Professor David Yoffe points out that Apple's long-standing image - a valiant David who outwits the various Goliaths of the computer industry - persists even though the company controls about 80 per cent of the legal downloadable music market and about 75 per cent of the market for MP3 players. 
Apple's success can be boiled down to five simple rules that apply not just to Apple but to other companies as well. The rules aren't foolproof (for one thing, they tend to work better when Steve Jobs is running the company), but they may be useful to other CEOs who want to place their companies outside the mainstream—and out of the range of critics. Of course, your products had better be as good as Apple's too. 
1. Excellence trumps everything 
Forrester analyst Ted Schadler has a two-word explanation for Apple's hard-to-dent public image: "Great products." 
Much of the credit goes to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, says Donald Norman, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group and former head of Apple's Advanced Technology Group: "He has always had great product taste." Even the occasional misbegotten computer, online service, or device - the Cube, for example, or the not-ready-for-prime- time Newton - only serves to reinforce the edginess that is a major element of the Apple brand identity. 
"Great designers will have great products and great failures,: Norman says. "Otherwise, they're not trying hard enough." If you want your company to mimic Apple's success, you really do have to think different(ly). Part of that is being willing to move on—from either a failure or a success. The Mini was the best-selling entry in the iPod line, but instead of letting the new Nano stand alongside it, Apple close to replace it. "We decided to burn the boats and go for it," Greg Joswiak, Cupertino's vice-president of worldwide product marketing for iPod, said at the Forrester Consumer Forum in New York. 
2. Decide on your story, then stick to it 
Apple's corporate narrative has key elements that resonate with consumers - and, just as important, with business journalists who need a way to dramatise the competition they cover. "People like an underdog," says Forrester's Schadler. To judge by the durability of that meme, Apple's famed "1984" advertisement may be the most effective commercial ever made. Apple paid to air it only once, during the 1984 Super Bowl broadcast. But thanks to repeated free rebroadcasts in news shows and documentaries, the "1984" ad succeeded in implanting in the business press the image of Apple as the fearless upstart fomenting revolution against the gray overlords. 
The continuing appeal of that story was on vivid display at the D: All Things Digital conference in June. Sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, D annually features sometimes confrontational interviews with moguls such as Bill Gates and Barry Diller, onstage before an audience consisting mainly of computer executives. At the 2005 session, the PC industry's top players faced tough questions from Journal staff members and the audience about marketing misfires, missed forecasts, and product shortcomings. But the rules changed when Apple CEO Jobs was in the spotlight. 
The first audience question Jobs faced had nothing to do with Apple's tie-up with Intel—then at the rumor stage—or the company's then-recent decision to seek a restraining order against the Think Secret website, run by Apple über fan Nicholas Ciarelli, to prevent it from reporting on Apple's internal deliberations and pending products. 
No, the first audience question was a solicitous inquiry into the health of Jobs, who underwent surgery in 2004 to treat pancreatic cancer. For his part, Journal technology writer Walter Mossberg, who flung high hard ones at other guests, was noticeably more gentle in his treatment of Jobs, throwing hanging curves, if not softballs. 
Since the "1984" ad, Apple consistently has claimed to be a different kind of company. Repetition pays. Judging from Jobs' reception at D, Apple's narrative of difference has firmly established itself in the minds of the press. Say what you are. Stick to it, again and again. 
3. Choose your friends well 
Part of Apple's brand identity derives not from the products themselves but from the people associated with them. Sounds elementary, but few marketers are as aggressive or audacious as Apple in claiming kinship with the celebrated. 
The list of famous Apple fans ranges from U2 front man Bono, who recently told an interviewer that the iPod is "the most beautiful object art in the music world since the electric guitar," to the makers of Sex and the City, who frequently showed the show's star clicking away on her iBook. Such endorsements are fervent, but they're a fairly ordinary gambit in the corporate image-making playbook. What's unusual to the point of singularity is Apple's chutzpah in claiming the imprimatur of notables who died before the PC existed. The "Think Different" ad campaign enabled Apple to shelter under the penumbrae cast by maverick geniuses such as Einstein and Gandhi. 
4. Choose your enemies better 
Apple has always been lucky, or smart, in its choice of enemies. The company unveiled the first Macintosh during the peak of IBM's dominance of the computer market, and its implicit portrayal of Big Blue as a tyrant convinced many individual computer buyers (though not the corporate ones). 
Likewise, in the mid-1990s, when US and European antitrust regulators were circling around Microsoft, Apple's supposed corporate attributes stood out in relief. In the context of the accusations that landed Microsoft in antitrust court, Apple's 2.5 per cent market share looked less like a sign of weakness and more like an emblem of virtue. 
5. Let your allies play bad cop 
Apple rarely bashes its competitors directly, not even Microsoft - at least not since 1997, when the Redmond, Washington, giant bought a $US150 million ($A199 million) stake in Apple and announced it would continue to develop software for the Macintosh. Why bother to attack when surrogates can do it so much more effectively? 
Although he recently bowed to commercial pressure and signed a deal with Microsoft, Sun Computer CEO Scott McNealy, a longtime Apple booster, has been cracking on Microsoft in general and Bill Gates in particular for the better part of two decades. As late as 2002 he was quipping that he couldn't retire and "leave my kid to a world of Control-Alt-Delete." Such remarks plait neatly into the narrative of Apple as a force of liberation. No need to mention Apple directly. Apple can be everything Microsoft is not, without ever explicitly claiming a difference. Show, don't tell. Let others tell. Such a strategy also keeps bad blood to a minimum, making it easier to align with Microsoft when it suits Apple's and Microsoft's strategies. 
Steve Jobs is a legendary salesperson. His ability to persuade people of, well, anything, as long as they're in his presence, even has a name: "the reality distortion field," a science- fiction term borrowed by original Macintosh OS developer Bud Tribble. Jobs and Apple's other marketers have applied their skills to pitch the Macintosh and the iPod. 
Their most effective marketing, however, may not be on behalf of a particular product but, rather, a brand. Apple has created a special place for itself in the public mind. By studying how Apple has done so, CEOs can learn a lot about the power of great design, and even more about the power of a great story. 
The 2.5 Percent Solution: Why bigger isn't necessarily better for Apple 
Hard as it is to believe today, when Apple Computer's Macintosh line clings to a mere 2.5 per cent share of PC sales, Apple machines once challenged for dominance of the PC market. In 1981, IBM PCs and clones held 2.5 per cent of the market; the Apple II, 15 per cent; the Atari 400/800s, 21 per cent; and the Radio Shack TRS-80, 18 per cent. 
Fortunately for Apple, those heady days are long gone. Mac fanciers still rue the strategic missteps by Apple's management that resulted in the rise of the Microsoft-Intel alliance and the decline of the Macintosh as a serious competitor in the corporate computing market. 
But as executives at Microsoft can attest, perceived monopoly control over the PC business isn't without its headaches. The 2001 settlement with the US Justice Department required few changes to Microsoft's basic business model, and Windows-based machines are still the PCs of choice around the world. But those machines are the prime target for viruses, worms, and other malware precisely because Windows is in such wide use. Apple machines, in contrast, have been the target of only one high-profile malicious program in more than 20 years. 
Larger market share could make the Macintosh a more attractive target to the bad guys. Besides, a 2.5 percent market share helps Apple maintain its image as the lovable upstart battling the monolith, which comes in rather handy now that Apple controls about 75 per cent of the U.S. market for MP3 players. And that share is growing. 
Harris Collingwood is an executive editor of Forrester Magazine, a publication of Forrester Research, where this article was first published. It is reprinted with permission; copyright rests with the author. 

This article isn't as good as I hoped it would be, but it does illuminate certain things about a brand of computer that gets far more attention than it should, considering it's tiny share of the market. I'd stop at rule #1, because without it, everything else doesn't matter.

The five rules of cool
By Harris Collingwood

December 13, 2005 - 12:00AM 
 
Almost since its founding in 1976, Apple Computer has enjoyed a prominence out of all proportion to its rather modest share of the personal computer market. That prominence can be measured by the attention lavished on the company's every move as well as every attempt to analyse its strategy and tactics. 
 
Consider the uproar from Macintosh purists when Apple launched its brief attempt to license its operating system to other hardware companies. When Apple reversed course and opted to keep its operating system to itself, another camp bellowed just as loudly. 
 
Whenever a journalist suggests that Apple might be something less than the most perfect organisation in recorded history, the poor sap is deluged with emails and phone calls from self-appointed "Mac Marines." 
 
note: the "Mac Marines" line made me laugh, but really, who are these annoying people? Why do these "self-appointed" morons feel compelled to display blind loyalty? Then get militant or infantile about it? These are the nuts who amplify Apple's "Cult" image, which hurts more than helps. This must drive columnists crazy, always having to qualify analysis or criticism by adding "mac fantatics, please don't bomb my inbox". We could all do without supporters like these, it's not a church, it's not a tribe, it's not a special club, it's a consumer product, okay? Subject to market forces, tastes, attitudes, and criticism--fair or unfair--just like any other product.  
--MD 
The general perception of Apple as an exceptional entity rather than a profit-making enterprise is no accident. Apple's leaders have assiduously cultivated the image of a corporation that is hip, stylish, humane: the maker of "the computer for the rest of us," the company whose epochal 1984 advertisement promised a machine that would liberate humankind from the tyranny of large, impersonal computer companies. 
 
The effort has paid off handsomely. Despite some hooting and hollering on weblogs, the majority of the business press and the buying public don't seem to object when Apple, say, takes legal action against some of the biggest fans of its products. When Microsoft, for example, is accused of bullying its customers and rivals, or reverses itself in public, it's criticised in the mainstream press, flamed on online tech forums such as Slashdot, and sometimes even sued by usually laissez-faire antitrust enforcers. 
 
Similar accusations regarding Apple are ignored, minimised, or laughed off, while the company's earnings soar past Wall Street's expectations and iPods fly off the shelves at a rate of more than 6 million per quarter. It's as if the entire company has ingested some magical elixir that immunises it against bad publicity. Envious CEOs can only ask, "Where can I get some of that stuff?" 
 
Consider the reaction to the shorter-than-expected battery life that plagued some early iPods. Forrester research notes that a mere 12 per cent of iPod owners aren't satisfied with the device's battery life. Or consider the reaction of iTunes customers when RealNetworks launched a rival service. Did customers flee to Real, which offered them the freedom to use a wide array of music players? No. They stayed with Apple and its market-leading iPod/iTunes combo, even celebrating their captivity (iTunes is built to connect only with iPods). "I already had my choice, I chose Apple, I chose iPod, and I chose iTunes," said one post on a message board set up by RealNetworks. 
 
Such sentiments are the mark of a true believer in the Apple story. Harvard Business School Professor David Yoffe points out that Apple's long-standing image - a valiant David who outwits the various Goliaths of the computer industry - persists even though the company controls about 80 per cent of the legal downloadable music market and about 75 per cent of the market for MP3 players. 
 
Apple's success can be boiled down to five simple rules that apply not just to Apple but to other companies as well. The rules aren't foolproof (for one thing, they tend to work better when Steve Jobs is running the company), but they may be useful to other CEOs who want to place their companies outside the mainstream—and out of the range of critics. Of course, your products had better be as good as Apple's too. 
 
1. Excellence trumps everything 
 
Forrester analyst Ted Schadler has a two-word explanation for Apple's hard-to-dent public image: "Great products." 
 
Much of the credit goes to Apple CEO Steve Jobs, says Donald Norman, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group and former head of Apple's Advanced Technology Group: "He has always had great product taste." Even the occasional misbegotten computer, online service, or device - the Cube, for example, or the not-ready-for-prime- time Newton - only serves to reinforce the edginess that is a major element of the Apple brand identity. 
 
"Great designers will have great products and great failures,: Norman says. "Otherwise, they're not trying hard enough." If you want your company to mimic Apple's success, you really do have to think different(ly). Part of that is being willing to move on—from either a failure or a success. The Mini was the best-selling entry in the iPod line, but instead of letting the new Nano stand alongside it, Apple close to replace it. "We decided to burn the boats and go for it," Greg Joswiak, Cupertino's vice-president of worldwide product marketing for iPod, said at the Forrester Consumer Forum in New York. 
 
2. Decide on your story, then stick to it 
 
Apple's corporate narrative has key elements that resonate with consumers - and, just as important, with business journalists who need a way to dramatise the competition they cover. "People like an underdog," says Forrester's Schadler. To judge by the durability of that meme, Apple's famed "1984" advertisement may be the most effective commercial ever made. Apple paid to air it only once, during the 1984 Super Bowl broadcast. But thanks to repeated free rebroadcasts in news shows and documentaries, the "1984" ad succeeded in implanting in the business press the image of Apple as the fearless upstart fomenting revolution against the gray overlords. 
 
The continuing appeal of that story was on vivid display at the D: All Things Digital conference in June. Sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, D annually features sometimes confrontational interviews with moguls such as Bill Gates and Barry Diller, onstage before an audience consisting mainly of computer executives. At the 2005 session, the PC industry's top players faced tough questions from Journal staff members and the audience about marketing misfires, missed forecasts, and product shortcomings. But the rules changed when Apple CEO Jobs was in the spotlight. 
 
The first audience question Jobs faced had nothing to do with Apple's tie-up with Intel—then at the rumor stage—or the company's then-recent decision to seek a restraining order against the Think Secret website, run by Apple über fan Nicholas Ciarelli, to prevent it from reporting on Apple's internal deliberations and pending products. 
 
No, the first audience question was a solicitous inquiry into the health of Jobs, who underwent surgery in 2004 to treat pancreatic cancer. For his part, Journal technology writer Walter Mossberg, who flung high hard ones at other guests, was noticeably more gentle in his treatment of Jobs, throwing hanging curves, if not softballs. 
 
Since the "1984" ad, Apple consistently has claimed to be a different kind of company. Repetition pays. Judging from Jobs' reception at D, Apple's narrative of difference has firmly established itself in the minds of the press. Say what you are. Stick to it, again and again... 
 
the full article can be found here: 
 

Posted: Mon - December 12, 2005 at 12:38 PM        

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