Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [73]
This is basic stuff for some, but for a huge swath of the population, some friendly, simple guidance is key to making a sale. It’s amazing how important this is for gaining new customers who are unfamiliar with the technology. I recently overheard one potential customer asking if he needed a computer to use his new iPod. Another booked a session at the Genius Bar, which is normally reserved for troubleshooting, to learn how to plug her iPod into her computer and transfer music.
When a customer buys a new Mac, the machine is personalized for them, for free, before they leave the store. Staff will load up drivers for the customer’s printer or camera, and help set up an Internet connection. Switchers from Windows love this kind of hand-holding, and it’s vastly different from shopping at big-box stores, where the only contact is the security guard checking your bag or cart as you leave.
The Apple stores are extremely busy. They are always full and often packed. According to Apple, they are some of the busiest retail stores in the industry, rivaling big grocery stores and popular restaurants. When Apple opens a new store, there’s always a line of fans who camp out the night before. Some fans travel to every opening in their area, and a dedicated few fly international or cross-country to big store openings in London, Tokyo, or California.
When Jobs returned to Apple, he knew that the company needed a retail presence just to survive. Before Apple launched its stores, its only direct contact with customers was at the Macworld conferences, which attracted at their height about 80,000 conference attendees to a pair of biannual meets. (These days, more than 80,000 people visit Apple’s stores every morning, and another 80,000 in the afternoon!)
In the mid-1990s, Macs were sold through mail-order catalogs or at retailers like Circuit City or Sears, where they were often relegated to a dusty back shelf. Neglected and ignored, the Macs got scant attention. Sales reps steered customers to the Windows PCs up front. Things were so bad for Apple that some Mac fans took it upon themselves to staff the stores on nights and weekends as unofficial salespeople, trying desperately to sell Macs in their spare time.
In the late 1990s, Apple started experimenting with mini stores-within-stores at CompUSA, which was a minor success, telling Jobs that Apple needed to expand its high-street presence while making shopping for a Mac a more Apple-like experience. But Jobs wanted total control, which he could achieve only if Apple opened its own stores. Jobs wanted “the best buying experience for its products, and thought that most of the resellers weren’t investing enough in their stores or making other selling improvements,” he told the Wall Street Journal. Note his telling phrase: “the best buying experience.” Like all of Jobs’s endeavors the stores are driven by the customer experience.
At the time, Jobs said 95 percent of consumers “don’t even consider Apple,” and the company needed a place with knowledgeable staff to show how the Mac could become the center of their lives. The stores would especially target Windows users. It would be a friendly place for them to check out Macs. An early tag line for the stores said, “5 down, 95 to go,” referring to the 5 percent Mac market share compared with Microsoft’s 95 percent.
Jobs was wary of getting burned in retail, so he did his usual trick of recruiting the best person he could find, who turned out to be Mickey Drexler, president and CEO of The Gap. In May 1999, Drexler joined Apple’s board. His “expertise in marketing and retail will be a tremendous resource as Apple continues to grow in the consumer market,” said Jobs in a press release. “He will add a completely new dimension to Apple’s board.”
Jobs then called Ron Johnson, a retail veteran who’d helped turn Target from a Wal-Mart also-ran into an upmarket purveyor of affordable design. Johnson had recruited name-brand designers to