Apple has done an amazing job in creating an image and what used to be a customer base of passionate brand advocates.  People who were so gung ho on the brand that they would defend everything the company did, no matter what.  Today, I think they have morphed more into a company that caters to product advocates…people who love their i-phone, their i-pod, garage band, whatever.

Job’s rock-star style of ‘shock and awe’ product releases has created a double edged sword in the sense that everybody expects Apple to turn out fabulous, sexy and useful stuff.  I am going to go on record in saying that Apple’s ID (industrial design) team is legendary.  They could make a doormat sexy.  However, if it is not useful, or user-friendly the value starts to diminish.

I see a couple cracks in the dam that indicate there is trouble brewing.

1.  Apple’s twitter feed has over 24,000 followers.  It does NOT allow for @ REPLIES or RT (re-tweets).  It simply pushes out branded content with no concern or care to who is listening or why.  Marty Collins does a good job breaking this fact down.

2.  Genius bar.  If you have ever used it, unless you are a power Apple user (i.e. know exactly how to work the computer, the website and the system), in which case you mostly don’t need the genius bar in the first place, this is a horrible experience for the average Mac user.  It’s noisy, crowded, difficult to get an appointment and most people end up feeling like idiots and leave disgruntled.  Mostly because the 28 year old person on the other side of the counter (which separates you from them) has a t-shirt on that essentially says, ‘hey I am smarter than you.)  Apple wants to cultivate this image.  They believe it.

But not everybody feels this is a great experience.  On more than one occasion, I have been in a store and overheard some poor customer say either to a genius or to anybody in earshot that was listening, “Are you actually trying to make me miserable?”  or here was a real gem from the Michigan Avenue (Chicago) store “Do you think that you have me so completely that you can treat me like this and I won’t care?  Or that I have no choice?'” 

3.  Apple’s tools and marketing channels are devoid of any voice of the customer.  No UGC, no interactive tools, no learn from people like me, no easy and useful communities of other passionate users that’s integrated with the product. Instead, you find product, marketing content and white space.

In fact, I have to go to France (OK, it’s Sara France) to get to some form of consumer UCG I might find helpful.  But again, this is marketing content.  Not user content.  No way to rate or rank, share, communicate, collaborate, learn or experience. 

As marketing to consumers becomes challenging, not to mention an economy that is making virtually every shopper consider what they are buying, why and what is the value, Apple is on the verge of creating a problem for themselves.  It won’t manifest quickly I think but will come to a boil over time.

I saw this first hand a long time back when Scully headed Apple.  They (and he) knew better.  They (and he) never listened.  They spoke.  The company teetered on the brink because of that. 

Don’t get me wrong.  I love Apple.  I love the history, I love the overcome all odds mentality, I love the fact that they do get the product experience, every element from the packaging to the plug in.  I have many friends who are former Apple superstars.  Developers and marketers alike.

For Apple to capitalize on their still-strong fame, they need to re-think:

1.  Content only being 1 way.

2.  User Feedback and aggregation of the consumer’s content being a core strategy.

3.  Integration of the user experience into the product (think Yelp, Amazon, etc.)

4. Re-invent the store.

5.  Have a couple of marketing messages, not just bashing Microsoft.  Spotlight your customer!  Geico has a number of methods.  Sure, they are cheesy but it’s unsexy car insurance, not sexy devices.

Just a few thoughts. 

I had dinner last night with an economist formerly who is also a friend of mine and with whom I used to race bicycles.  Years ago, we were both track racers (riding in a velodrome with a heavily banked track).  Our specialty was the 500 meter kilo, a very fast and short race.  Later, we graduated to racing criteriums and one day ‘classics’ races.  In essence, we had become specialists.  Focusing on more dangerous, faster and shorter races.  Neither of us had the gas for longer or multi-stage races.  We’d been conditioned to perform differently.

My friend and I discussed the stage of the economy, covering four important topics.  The stimulus package, the credit lock, the paradox of thrift and wall street’s myopic approach to economic growth.  Each of these things alone are important and will have an impact on our economy for the next 20 years.  Together, no one knows what will really happen.  We have to look to the past for answers. 

The net is that a free market economy always rights itself, as long as it is based on a sound structure.  Unfortunately, the hunger for profit has caused Wall Street to create new financial instruments that are essentially based on nothing other than risk itself.  Derivatives of derivatives.  Not a lot different than playing Kino or Baccarat in Vegas.  Wall Street bet on black and it came up red.

Now that a big chunk of what fuels our economy (i.e. the financial sector) is no longer truly part of the free economy, what with the financial firms being nationalized and all, we are in new brand new territory.

That said, are we are more likely to be seriously hobbled again in the future by Wall Street itself or instead by the Federal Government’s ownership interests.  Truly, these two forces are at odds.  So what will happen?  Will our growth engine of the future be a Hemi or a Hybrid?

What I mean by this can be found in the outset of this blog post where I discuss cycling and the correlation my friend made.

The macro-economic trends which drive our U.S. economy, as well as, the integrated components of our economy that aren’t U.S. based but global in nature.  Not being an economist (like my friend), I don’t want to debate where macro-economics converts to micro and the interdependencies between the two.  Instead, here’s the important notion. 

As a cyclist, my friend and I focused on short, fast races and were not equipped to race longer races, say like the Tour of California.  Our economy is essentially a long race.  Wall Street has trained public companies to race short races.  Meet the quarterly guidance at all costs.  Juice the numbers, move assets, sell at a discount, just meet the numbers so our stock price doesn’t tank and keeps us from borrowing money or selling our bonds.  It’s a vicious cycle.

Getting new products to market, capitalizing on market share opportunities.  These are sprints.  Short races.  Running say Citigroup, AIG, Boeing, Microsoft.  These are long races.  As my friend reminded me, Lance Armstrong won 7 Tours.  He didn’t win every stage, or even the majority.  He won the overall race. 

If we want our economy to right itself, get the speculators and gamblers out of the business decision process.  They will always promote a sprint.  Let them gamble (they always will, we can’t stop that) but not at the cost of influencing the outcome of the longer race. 

Can the Mongols of Wall Street co-exist with their new bed fellows, the shackled and risk-adverse CEO’s, and their new bosses, the beurocrats and politicians of the federal government?  Maybe, if each understands their place on the team.  Sprinters sprint when appropriate and climbers climb when the need to.  My guess is they won’t play nicely. 

The fact is that the Feds never, every give up anything.  So I am not sure AIG will ever return to its previous form.  So, we shall see.  It’s gonna be a long and scary ride for sure.

Recently, I got a call from a friend of mine. He’s a pretty smart guy, but he began our call like this. “Hey, I may be an idiot because I don’t understand something that seems so mind-numbingly simple. Can you help me?” I asked him what was bothering him. He said that over the last couple of days he’s responded to a couple of surveys. One he got in the mail, another came as part of a sales receipt where he dialed into an 888 number. The third survey he had just finished and they had called him. In each instance he had been asked a question that made no sense from his point of view.

My friend owns a successful manufacturing company and has undergraduate and graduate degrees in finance, so he sees things pretty black and white. He has been a loyal customer to each of the brands to whom he’d responded to the survey information, so he was happy to take the time to complete each survey. In each survey, they asked how likely he would be to recommend their brand to others. He responded that he’d be likely to do so.

Seems simple enough, right?

Wrong.

In reality, as he said, he is very uncomfortable in imposing his point of view on others, unless they specifically ask him what he thinks; which is a rare occurrence, since he doesn’t tend to talk about such things regularly. Moreover, currently he isn’t recommending any of these brands to anyone. Not that he doesn’t love them; he said that he did. He just doesn’t go out of his way to do it, isn’t doing it and can’t remember the last time he did. This concept really bothered him.

He said to me, “Steve, the survey is worthless because it is going to report something that isn’t happening. They should have asked me if I was recommending them. Right?”

He continued, “It reminds me of a former salesman I had. He’d put into his sales forecasts projects he thought would close when he had no data to prove they would. He just felt good about the opportunity. In the end, he was trying to create a reality that really wasn’t there.

When I got rid of him, I personally went out and met with all our key customers and asked them for their honest appraisal of us. What I heard wasn’t all pleasant but it was what was keeping us from winning all of their business, so we went away and acted on what they told us.

Knowing that information was critical, it wasn’t pleasant but it was necessary. Since then, we’ve doubled our profitability and have not lost one customer. Our prices are 20% higher than our competitors. We couldn’t do this without customer advocates and we would have customer advocates without meeting their needs. We can’t meet their needs unless we know what they think.”

He’s right again. Being likely to recommend doesn’t mean you are or will. But it sure makes it easy to say “yes” and marketers feel better about reporting the fact that 85% of their customers are likely to recommend their products and services.

Sounds a lot better than currently 18% of our customers actively recommend us on a regular basis, doesn’t it? So his question to me on why this was is a good one, as was his point. What do you think?

Why is the phrase ‘are you likely to recommend’ used instead of ‘are you currently recommending’?

The answer might lie in the fact that if not enough people are recommending the brand.

Might it be because the experience falls short and that would require real and meaningful change? Perhaps it is because the brand does little to engage them as advocates? I couldn’t give him a good answer why there wasn’t (to use his terms) more of a ‘concrete present value’ to most of marketing.

In the past, I had given this friend Fred Reichheld’s book, ‘The Ultimate Question’ as well as, a couple of others such as ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’ and ‘Return on Customer’.

He liked each very much but in the end, his opinion was that it easier for marketers to keep creating TV commercials with good looking actors portraying happy customers and asking if consumers might possibly be willing to do something sometime in the unspecified future than truly engaging the customer, asking tough questions and instituting real change to meet their needs and requirements. That was my friend’s point of view. I thought that this story was worth sharing.

Here is mine: The one word you need to know to grow is ‘are’ (as in are you recommending).

It is time to stop talking about customer engagement and do it.

It is time to stop thinking we know what is in the minds of our customers and invite them into the process.

It is time to treat our best customers better than our next customer.

It is time to stop worrying about politics of making change and act.

It’s time to stop organizing focus groups that include people who have never bought our products and probably never will.

It is time to stop talking to our customers and start talking with them.