Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired--and Secretive--Company Really Works (14 page)

Storytelling may seem ephem Kay theyeral and difficult to quantify in a business setting, but George Blankenship, a top executive of Apple’s retail initiative when it began, explained the very real link between storytelling and driving demand. “If you went back to the year 2000 and you looked at Apple, most people knew one thing about Apple products: They didn’t want one,” he said. “And so what ended up happening was an education process. We needed to get in front of as many people as possible. So they’re walking by, and eventually one day they walk in. And then we get a chance to tell the story and we tell that story in a way that is respectful, helpful, friendly, and not pushy. It’s not about price. It’s about product.”

Like missionaries sent in diverse directions to prosely
tize, Apple executives have total recall for the message. “The goal of the Apple stores was to appeal to non-Macintosh customers,” said Allen Olivo, a marketing executive at Apple when the stores opened, as if he had just conferred with Blankenship, which he hadn’t. “We had to convince people who are skeptical, who don’t use our products, who don’t know what they can do with these products. When they walk in the store there has to be an experience that allows them to see and touch and feel and use and do stuff with the Mac.”

Apple storytelling initially is high concept, telling customers not what they want to buy but what kind of people they want to be. This is classic “lifestyle” advertising, the selling of an image associated with a brand rather than the product itself. From Apple’s iconic “Think Different” campaign in 1997 featuring images of Gandhi and Einstein and Bob Dylan (and no Apple products) to its later silhouetted hipsters grooving to music on their iPods (with the ubiquitous white earbuds connected to white cords streaking down their lithe bodies), Apple has excelled at selling a lifestyle.

Once Apple has the customer’s attention, however, it goes to great lengths to explain in minute and gorgeous detail what its products can do. Consider the launch of a new version of its iMovie software in 2005. iMovie is one of several features in Apple’s iLife software package, which is standard on Macs. (Whether you’re aware of it or not, it sits there in the dock at the bottom of your screen. Its icon is a star reminiscent of those found on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.) Apple originally created iLife because so few third-party developers were writing programs for the
Mac. Supplying useful programs made the Mac more valuable, and explaining to customers how to use its software became second nature to Apple.

In 2005, Apple introduced a high-definition version of iMovie. Users could edit home movies on their Macs by transferring video from handheld cameras onto their computers. High-def video cameras were just then becoming widely available, so Apple confronted a chicken-and-egg moment: It needed to demonstrate the value of HD video in order to drive adoption of HD, which in turn justified the value of its software and hardware.

One of the most common applications of iMovie had been do-it-yourself wedding videos. Apple may not do customer research to decide what products to make, but it absolutely pays attention to how customers use its products. So the marketing team working on the iMovie HD release scheduled for Macworld, on January 11, 2005, decided to shoot a wedding. The ceremony it filmed was gorgeous: a sophisticated, candlelit affair at the Officers’ Club of San Francisco’s Presidio. The bride was an Apple employee, and the wedding was real. There was one problem with the footage, however. Steve Jobs didn’t like it. He watched Kt. The it the week before Christmas, recalled Alessandra Ghini, the marketing executive managing the launch of iLife. Jobs declared that the San Francisco wedding didn’t capture the right atmosphere to demonstrate what amateurs could do with iMovie. “He told us he wanted a wedding on the beach, in Hawaii, or some tropical location,” said Ghini. “We had a few weeks to find a wedding on a beach and to get it shot, edited, and approved by Steve. The tight time frame allowed for no margin for error.”

With time short and money effectively no object, the team went into action. It contacted Los Angeles talent agencies as well as hotels in Hawaii to learn if they knew of any weddings planned—preferably featuring an attractive bride and groom—over the New Year’s holiday. They hit pay dirt in Hollywood: A gorgeous agency client and her attractive fiancé were in fact planning to wed on Maui during the holiday. Apple offered to pay for the bride’s flowers, to film the wedding, and to provide the couple with a video. In return, Apple wanted rights for up to a minute’s worth of footage of its choosing.

Filming the event was no small production. An Apple creative director and crew flew to Hawaii. They worked with local florists to get the look they wanted. They also huddled repeatedly with the couple, who was understandably concerned by all the hubbub. A camera crew canvassed the beach the day before to make sure they understood where the sun would set. Shortly after the wedding, the director began uploading footage and called California with good news: “I’m super happy,” he said. Steve Jobs was pleased, too. He approved the new footage a few days before Macworld. In the end, the Macworld keynote used a roughly sixty-second clip of the wedding, featuring sequences of the bride and groom kissing, the bride and her father dancing, and the newlywed couple strolling off into the sunset. Slightly longer versions ran during an on-site trailer at the event and in Apple retail stores. “The budget is significant,” remembered Ghini, who nevertheless was unfazed by the expenditure. “It had to be because of the last-minute changes.”

From Apple’s perspective, the lavish spending is worth it because nothing is more valuable than the Apple brand.
It’s a nuanced and subtle approach. Nine times out of ten, the distinctions will not consciously register with the typical consumer. But that’s beside the point. The sum total of Apple’s obsessions, including how it projects its image, absolutely is not lost on its customers, who intuitively appreciate that Apple is a cut above. This explains why no one at Apple thinks it’s the slightest bit unusual to hire the London Symphony Orchestra to record iMovie music trailers.

And nobody bats an eye at big outlays that end up being for naught. When Apple was preparing to launch the version of its Macintosh operating system called Snow Leopard, the marketing team had planned to use a stock photo of an elusive cat but wanted to try to do better. The group sent a crew to photograph a snow leopard in captivity—at considerable expense. Steve Jobs wasn’t satisfied with the result. “He looks fat and lazy,” said Jobs. “Not hungry and fast.”

T
he lights go down. The crowd hushes itself with anticipation. Music that has been blaring, typically a popular anthem, an old U2 song perhaps, fades. Steve Jobs walks onstage, and the crowd goes wild. Senior Apple executives sit in the first couple of rows, joined by VIPs like venture capitalist John Doerr or Apple board member Al Gore. They clap and laugh and cheer along with everyone else. In Cupertin K. I by VIPso, Apple employees gather in cafeterias to watch on closed-circuit TVs. Given Apple’s secrecy, what the public is about to see in an auditorium and what online viewers will watch on their iPads will be completely new to them—and just as new to Apple’s
employees. Even those who’ve worked on a portion of an about-to-be-launched product won’t necessarily have a clue about what else will be announced simultaneously. They only know their portion.

This is an Apple keynote address. Steve Jobs described marketing as the cover of the Apple book, with products being what’s on the pages inside. Just as products are the result of nearly endless design and manufacturing iterations, the keynote address is the highly honed presentation whereby Apple introduces to the world the fruits of its labor.

Jobs made an art form of keynotes, a stylized form of performance art that required contributions from the entire company. In the same way the different components of a jumbo jet are manufactured around the world and then assembled in a giant factory at the end of an arduous process, so, too, are Apple keynotes obsessively crafted in segments and then cobbled together for a massive audience on opening day.

Onstage, the keynote is a long collection of seemingly off-the-cuff remarks and live demonstrations. Behind the stage, Apple employees are a wreck. They’ve been rehearsing for months, leaving nothing to chance, assembling slides and photos and talking points to be whittled down into the presentation that is going on right now. (The slides will be in Apple’s Keynote presentation software, of course, introduced in 2003 as Apple’s answer to Microsoft’s PowerPoint. The software grew out of a program Jobs had been using for just this purpose.) For a Mac event, Jobs worked off a Mac on a cart onstage. Offstage, an identical cart carried an identical Mac with the identical presentation on it in case the first one crashed.
Jobs himself rehearsed the presentation dozens of times so that each relaxed statement would come off just right. Partners, too, will have run through multiple rehearsals, all according to Apple’s schedule and following Apple’s script. One partner executive—Apple invites companies whose software works on Apple products to demonstrate their wares to buttress Apple’s offerings—recounted spending a week and a half in Cupertino leading up to an Apple product launch. He presented to an increasingly senior list of Apple executives, culminating with Jobs. An aide to another high-profile executive who debuted software that ran on Apple’s iPhone recalled the marching orders: “They told us—didn’t ask us, told us—what time the rehearsal was, what he should wear, and what he should say. There was no discussion about it.”

A keynote will cycle through a handful of products. For years Jobs did the entire presentation himself, with bit roles played by low-level employees brought onstage to demonstrate features. Over time, other executives took on more and more prominent roles. The signature finale to a major keynote speech is the slide that appears saying,
ONE MORE THING
…—signifying something important, new, and exciting. (The iPod Shuffle in 2005, the fifteen-inch MacBook Pro in 2006, and a dramatically revamped MacBook Air in 2010 are some examples.) Music product events will conclude with a performance by a big-name recording artist, like John Mayer or Coldplay’s Chris Martin. In 2009, a tentative Norah Jones sang two songs to conclude an iTunes event, obviously rattled by Apple’s neurotic pre-gig machinations. “There’s lots of secret passageways back there, secret door-knocks,” she said, an electric guitar hanging from her neck. fromˀneck. “I feel like a bur
den’s been lifted now that we can play.” She added, “Just kidding,” though clearly she wasn’t. After Jones strummed her last note, Jobs came out and pecked her on the cheek.

When the crowds are gone and the briefings are over, Apple employees will repair to one of a handful of nearby watering holes, like the XYZ Bar at the W Hotel across the street from the Moscone Center, to unwind. Many will immediately take vacations. They know the work on the next keynote will begin as soon as they return.

A
pple’s marketing and communications team works in a building just across from 1 Infinite Loop called M-3, the
M
standing for “Mariani Avenue,” not for marketing. When the marketers walk through the front door and then two consecutive secured doors, they walk around a light blue wall to get to their desks. On the wall is painted a prominent message in large whitish silver letters. It reads:
SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY, SIMPLIFY
. A broad line is drawn through the first two
SIMPLIFY
s.

It is not just Apple’s products that are fiercely simple, but also the way it deploys its brand. Consider the boilerplate language that appears at the bottom of every press release Apple issues. A version from late 2011 read: “Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices.” That’s it. Three sentences to describe $108 billion in revenue. Each word
is carefully chosen.
Design
is the first verb. Macs come first because, after all, Macs came first. Apple “leads” and “reinvents.” It is “revolutionary” (twice), and is nothing if not about the “future.” The wording is conscious and deliberate. “
Revolutionize
,” said a former Apple marketer, “may be the most used word in Apple marketing.”

The company is just as careful about how the Apple brand is used. Nobody has blanket permission to use it, first of all, and that includes insiders. A consultant who put the logo on his website to show that Apple was a client was asked to take it down. People who buy Apple products, on the other hand, are encouraged to display the Apple logo: Inside its product packaging Apple includes stickers with the iconic apple, which have a way of showing up on everything from spiral notebooks to car bumpers to refrigerators.

The message is driven home to employees who deal with the outside world. “You don’t want anything to detract from the brand,” said Lars Albright, an executive in Apple’s iAd mobile advertising business who left Apple in 2011 and founded SessionM, a start-up that helps applications developers retain their users. “And that’s in every aspect of it. You think through the lens of ‘Would this jeopardize the brand? Do we need to do it? Is it too much of a risk?’ ”

Apple’s brand czar, Hiroki Asai, is a quiet executive almost completely unknown to the general public. He studied printed design at California Polytechnic State University, where Mary LaPorte, his graphic design professor, remembered him as a stickler for details and aesthetic integrity. “If he wanted a coffee cup stain on a poster, then he would make sure it was coffee, and not brown ink,” she r Kinkaestheticecalled.