Maybe Design is the Answer: The Strength of Apple

A Business Insider article started with the headline:

Steve Jobs Spent 30 Minutes Debating The Shade Of Grey Apple Should Use For The Bathroom Signs In Apple Stores

Crazy, obsessive, effusive, finicky, … we can exhaust the English vocabulary in trying to find a word that perfectly describes this. However, we may be stuck for words when we discover this:

There are 510 Apple Stores in the globe and Steve Jobs insisted that the floor of each store must be made of stone gotten from a quarry outside of Florence in Italy. A top official at Apple noted:

“We select only 3% of what comes out of the mountain because it has to have the right shading and veining and purity … Steve felt very strongly that we had to get the color right and it had to be a material with high integrity.”

This obsessive attention to design and detail is how the brand exudes class, elegance, and sleekness. And that’s why you spend so much money on Apple products.

In Steve Jobs’ biography written by Walter Isaacson, the story was told of a lesson Job’s father taught him. His father was a carpenter who paid attention to every detail. He would design the inside of a cabinet as though it was on the outside. To him, everything mattered. He told Jobs that it was important to craft the inside of fences and cabinets even though they would never be seen.

Jobs never learned carpentry. It was the attention to every detail that he learned.

That singular lesson defines the entire Apple brand.

It is noteworthy that the screws used for Apple products are not on the market as they are manufactured exclusively. This means that you would only be able to fix your Apple device at an Apple Store. Yet, Jobs insisted on a beautiful design of the circuit board. (only Apple engineers would see it!)

Your Apple device is beautiful inside out! Well, you know how much you pay for it.

A new iPhone starts somewhere around $700 (N255,000) to about $2340 (N854,100). Whereas you can get a new Android phone for as low as $100 (36,500).

For Apple Macs, the prices differ with specifications. With the MacBook Air starting at $1000 (N365,000) to the iMac Pro which can be as high as $15,000 (N5,475,000) (depending on the specifications), I bet you want to say: what a price list!

Does this make Apple products the most efficient products in the market?

Not really. There are cheaper devices that are more efficient than Apple products. Yet, Apple users are loyal.

They may have to shell out hard-earned cash now and then, but they know what they are getting. What are your customers getting?

Do you design your products in a way that triggers a second glance?

You may not be a manufacturer, you may be a corporate employee. However, the way you design your presentations matter. Would you be attracted to your proposal to want to read it?

The world is focusing on the user experience. And it is no longer what the market wants, it is what blows the market’s mind.

Steve Jobs said “You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.”

As a leader, you define the vision. Your principles will invariably reflect on your brand. If you are a perfectionist, you’d want to get everything right to the last detail. But you don’t have to be a perfectionist, you only have to insist on nothing but the best.

Google was not the first search engine. However, it gave the best in reach and speed. While others produced a few search engine results, Google produced several pages within seconds. No surprise it had 92.96% of the search engine market in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Your unique selling point is your design. It is that detail that others are overlooking. Define this. Crystallize it. Market it.

A 2018 Forbes article reveals that even though Samsung ships more phones than Apple, Apple’s profit share is 4 times larger than Samsung, its nearest competitor.

This isn’t because iPhones are way better, it’s just that some people will use nothing, absolutely nothing, other than an iPhone.

That’s the power of design.

Originally published on Ourhoodspace