Brands Create Customers

In less than 60 minutes this morning Steve Jobs and Apple redefined the mobile phone, and perhaps the mobile phone business. They did this not by sheer technical wizardry, although there was plenty of that, but by reinventing the mobile phone customer, who just happens to be you and me.

Advancing the customer

A key goal of brands is to advance your customer far beyond the reach of competitors. With the iPhone, Apple has done just that. The iPhone enables a new you to emerge through its integrated music, media and communication powers. Once you’ve seen the iPhone, you can’t go back to the cramped stump of buttons that defines current mobile phone technology. That would be like going from a rich GUI back to a green phosphor CRT and command line.

iPhone and iPod cut from the same customer cloth

My guess is that Apple began work on an “iPhone” at the same time the iPod was conceived. Both are cut from the same customer cloth. In a true brand approach, Apple started with a higher concept of customer and worked back toward the product. They designed a new customer from scratch. Rather than compromise the customer, they kept innovating on the product side—until they got the right combination of form factor and performance.

Free the customer from a form-factor dead end

In terms of the iPhone, Apple’s brand goal was to free the customer from the historic constraints of the mobile phone—in every aspect of look and feel and operations that had taken the customer to a form-factor dead end. Existing phones were a platform for the carrier, not for the customer. The only way the Apple brand could change that was to reinvent the phone.

Today’s icons are tomorrow’s millstones

So, the iconic cell phone buttons had to go. Buttons now hang like millstones from the necks of every other mobile device. Flips, flaps, slides and hinges also went, along with the need to contort one’s fingers to them. Apple’s seamless digital approach is much kinder on customer digits. Similarly, Apple’s OS X software inside the iPhone is much kinder to the human spirit. You experience a powerful contextual device whose interface is obviously designed with you in mind.

Looking ahead

The new iPhone has a lot to live up to. We won’t know how much impact it will have on users until it’s available this summer. Exclusive carrier Cingular has a lot to live up to as well.

The Apple brand, though, is definitely on the side of customer freedom. That’s where every brand wants to be.

Photo: Ri©k™ — Flickr

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 8:23 pm and is filed under Brand Innovation, Brand Leadership, Creating Customers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.