The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty (27 page)

All information is shared daily with employees—average call times, sales, profits, and so on. In fact, Zappos is so open with their performance information that they post it on a board for all to see, employees and outsiders. Even during my tour I was completely free to take photographs and video. Zappos even streams its staff meetings on the Internet for anyone to see. This demonstrates a remarkable trust in their employees and a commitment to open and honest communications.

During our tour, an employee interrupted our tour guide to tape some segments for the company blog. Everyone was cheering and high-fiving each other. They have parties and events, and they’re encouraged to celebrate their uniqueness by decorating their cubicles—the more outrageous the better. I have never seen a group of people who have so much fun with each other. At Zappos, “fun” only becomes a problem when employees are not having it.

Tony Hsieh told me that he is not in the business of selling shoes. He’s in the business of “delivering happiness.” You see, although Zappos sells merchandise online, that’s not what the company stands for.
Zappos is not in the business of selling shoes, just as Apple is not in the business of selling computers. It enriches lives instead. Ask yourself, “What am I really selling, and what does our company culture say about our brand? Above all, commit yourself to celebrating your culture and communicating those values across the entire organization each and every day, consistently.

M
ost of the news articles that have tried to explain Apple’s success in retail highlight the spacious, clean, and well-lit physical appearance of the stores themselves. These are all important success factors and will be addressed in this section. But please remember this: if you have not mastered the principles in Parts I and II, nothing in this section will matter.

Cosmetic changes don’t matter if you have people who don’t like their boss, don’t like their job, and can’t communicate with their customers. I decided to return to a hotel for a second time even though I didn’t enjoy my first experience. It was pricey, dated, and dirty. Most of the staffers were also unfriendly. I stayed again for only one reason—it was the closest hotel to the place where I had to be the next morning and I would be arriving late the night before. When I walked in, I noticed something new. The hotel had recently added a signature scent, which seems to be a trend among some hotel chains. The Westin hotels have a signature scent, but they also provide a nice experience to complement the scent. That was the problem with my hotel. The scent was nice, but the staff was still unfriendly, the hotel was dated, and the rooms were still dirty! On a trip to Las Vegas we stayed at a beautiful smoke-free boutique hotel called Vdara. It, too, had a signature scent. The scent was so nice I actually bought the scent sticks to put in my office. But the scent was simply a bonus that capped a memorable experience.
The scent didn’t make the experience—the people made the experience. But the scent reminded me of the experience.

I hesitate to use the hackneyed expression “It’s like putting lipstick on a pig.” But in this case it works. No amount of lipstick is going to make up for unfriendly people delivering poor service. But if you have the people and the communication right, poor packaging will actually detract from the experience you worked so hard to achieve. Ron Johnson said all great customer service experiences start with great products and a clearly defined and concise vision. Once you have the products in place, the vision, the people, and the communication, it’s time to pay attention to the details of design and packaging to create a place where people feel comfortable returning again and again.

W
alk into an AT&T retail store in North America and you will notice that the stores have an open feel: uncluttered and spacious. Visit a Tesla electric car dealership and you will notice a similar store layout—uncluttered glass windows, simple furniture, interactive displays, and plenty of space to wander. Both brands copied Apple and are proud of it. Steve Jobs would pick up the phone and call AT&T’s head of retail to offer advice on store design, and Tesla’s vice president of sales and the “ownership experience,” George Blankenship, sat four offices from Steve Jobs in Cupertino, California, while he worked in the retail division of Apple. There’s a reason why Tesla dealerships look like Apple, feel like Apple, and are located in malls like Apple instead of traditional car lots off the beaten path. Blankenship wanted it that way. It worked for Apple and he believes it will work for Tesla because both brands must get people to “think differently” about the product—Tesla in the electric car category and Apple in 2001 when its market share was only 3 percent.

Apple changed the face of retail with its minimalist store design, open spaces, simple display tables, and large glass entrances. In doing so, it inspired other retailers including its competitor, Microsoft. As of this writing, Microsoft had opened fourteen stores around the United States and it most certainly took a page or two, or three, from the Apple Retail playbook. Friendly employees in brightly colored shirts greet visitors in stores that are spacious, clean, and uncluttered. Expansive windows invite shoppers to see the excitement inside the store and interactive display areas encourage customers to play with Microsoft products. The resemblance to the Apple Store design is more than a coincidence. The technology blog Gizmodo reported that Microsoft hired at least one Apple Store designer to act as a consultant on the new store design.

You can’t blame Microsoft. A store could do worse than copying one of the greatest models in retail history. Apple has learned that its customers like open spaces, glass entrances and staircases, and simple, handcrafted oak tables. According to Apple designer Jonathan Ive, “We are absolutely consumed by trying to develop a solution that is very simple because as physical beings we understand
clarity.”
¹
Ive was speaking about product design but this philosophy extends to the design of the Apple Store as well. Nowhere is that philosophy more evident than in Apple’s Grand Central Terminal store, which opened in December 2011.

Grand Central Apple Store.
Source: Getty Images

The store that Apple opened in one of the world’s busiest train stations, Grand Central, is radically different that most retail spaces anywhere in the world. It’s notable for the lack of a retail space. You never enter a store or leave the station. There are no walls and no separation between the station and the store. No product boxes can be seen. Instead all the devices are turned on and sit on large wooden tables evenly spaced between large aisles. One observer said the store combines the elements of a hands-on science museum with an art gallery. Fine art requires open space to be seen and appreciated.

In Apple’s world, anything that detracts from the user experience is eliminated, in product or store design. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 he axed more than 70 percent of the products to focus on the 30 percent that were gems. “If you go out and ask people what’s wrong with computers today, they’ll tell you they’re really complicated,”
²
said Steve Jobs in 1999 when Apple introduced the iMac. “They [computers] have a zillion cables coming out of the back, they’re really big and noisy, they’re really ugly, and they take forever to get on the Internet. We set out to fix those problems.”

Jobs once said that there is a strong DNA in the Apple culture to make state-of-the-art technology that people find easy to use. The DNA extends to the in-store experience. In fact, the stores embody the Apple brand, mirroring the experience of using Apple products. When the first Apple Store opened in Tysons Corner, Virginia, Jobs proudly said that Apple’s entire product line was on display in the first 25 percent of the store space. There’s only one button on the front of an iPad, making it so simple that a two-year-old can use it. The same design approach is evident in all of Apple’s
products because Steve Jobs wanted it that way. But when Jobs first applied the philosophy to the store experience he was met with very public criticism. Here’s a sample:

 

• “Sorry, Steve, here’s why Apple Stores won’t work.”
  ³
  —
  Businessweek
  
 

• “Apple’s problem is it still believes the way to grow is serving caviar in a world that seems pretty content with cheese and crackers.”
  ⁴
  —Joseph Graziano
  
 

• “I give them two years before they’re turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake.”
  ⁵
  —David Goldstein
  

Ten years later there were 350 Apple Stores with an aggressive roadmap for international expansion. The average location made an annual per store revenue of $34 million and made more per square foot than most luxury retailers. Now you know why Jobs avoided focus groups. He didn’t believe that people knew what they wanted until he showed it to them. In many ways he was right. Many people wouldn’t think about it at the time but they did, indeed, crave simplicity and space in their physical environments.

Jobs intuitively understood what neuroscientists would later find through electroencephalograph (EEG) and magnetic resonance image (MRI) brain scans. According to Dr. A. K. Pradeep, who founded Berkeley, California–based NeuroFocus, a neurological testing firm for consumer behavior, “Memory processing is influenced by suppressing distractions. Don’t overwhelm the brain, forcing it to expend more energy.”
⁶

Pradeep argues that eliminating distractions applies to the physical in-store experience as well as the way messages are delivered. “Keep the message obvious and direct, and keep the copy and images clean and uncluttered. Let the message ‘breathe’ with some white space around it. And avoid the impulse to load up messages with sounds, running screens, and quick animation.” Pradeep is one of the world’s leading neuromarketing researchers, pioneering the application of neuroscience in marketing, advertising, and messaging. Pradeep concludes from his research that simplicity improves
the shopping experience in every aspect. “Finding additional information, streamlining the purchase experience, transporting products to your home, opening the package, or fixing a problem, simplicity must be a core component of the consumer’s experience.”
⁷

When the Apple Store celebrated its tenth anniversary, a site called Visual Merchandising and Store Design (
vmsd.com
) asked a group of design experts for their thoughts on Apple Store design. Most pointed to the simple, uncluttered feel of the store as one of the primary reasons Apple revolutionized store design.
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