The Apple Experience: Secrets to Building Insanely Great Customer Loyalty Read Online Free Page A

accomplishing the vision. In his book,
Customer Culture
,Basch tells the story of Diane, a tracking clerk, who received a call from a distraught bride-to-be who needed a wedding dress to be delivered for her big day, which happened to be
the next day
. The dress, however, was 300 miles away. Diane had internalized the vision and did what had to be done. She lined up a Cessna and a pilot to fly the package to Florida. The bride was so ecstatic she called Diane from her honeymoon! She said the FedEx story stole the show. Everyone at the wedding was talking about the company that gave a wedding dress its own plane.
    When Diane told Basch about the situation, he was taken aback. They would surely go bankrupt if they kept pulling these stunts, he thought. But Diane could not be faulted for creatively executing on the vision. It didn’t take long for Basch to come around. One company executive who heard the wedding story assigned his company’s shipments to FedEx and began sending twenty packages via the service. Others at the wedding began using FedEx as their exclusive priority delivery company and continued to do so for years. According to Basch, “The biggest lesson was that if you were clear about what you wanted as leaders and then let people give it to you without tying their hands behind their backs, you got it.” 3
    In hindsight, Basch believes it would have been worse if FedEx had delivered 300 packages on its first day. Why? Early success breeds complacency. FedEx might have become sloppy about service and the customer experience. Instead, everyone began to obsess about creating an extraordinary service culture. According to Basch, “One of the most valuable lessons was the power of people when they have a common vision and commitment.” 4
    Basch says that a well-designed culture has six primary attributes, the first of which is vision, a clear picture of the desired customer experience (the other five are also relevant to the Apple experience and will be explored in the next chapters). “The vision provides the light and the gravitational force. The vision is the compass of the enterprise—its purpose for being. More practically and specifically, it is the experience that the organization is attempting to create for its customers, employees, and owners… the experience is then condensed into a headline that provides direction.” 5

The Apple Vision: Enriching Lives
     
    Let’s get back to the vision behind the Apple Store. Recall from my introduction, the vision behind Apple Retail can be found on the credo card: Enriching Lives. The former head of Apple Retail, Ron Johnson, said that when Apple opened its first retail store, not one analyst gave Apple a chance. Apple had 3 percent market share, Gateway had shuttered its retail because the stores were attracting only 200 or so people a week (today 22,000 people a week visit the typical Apple Store), and Apple was competing against computer players like Dell whose slim margins and lower costs seemed to be the preferred business model.
    According to Johnson, “A vision is something that you can say in one sentence. The fewer words the better. It’s like saying ‘A thousand songs in your pocket.’ It’s a clear vision that everyone understands.” 6 Johnson and Jobs decided to craft visions for their competitors. For example, retailers like Gateway “sell boxes.” Johnson believes a company vision will lead it to pursue a very specific set of conclusions about the experience it offers. So if your vision is to sell boxes or “stack ’em high and let ’em fly,” as some retailers do, it will lead to a business model that competes on price and price alone. For some large retailers, offering the cheapest price on the block has clearly been a formula for success. But most businesses cannot simply compete on price. They must differentiate on the customer experience. “When we envisioned the Apple model, we said that it has got to connect with Apple,” said