“Culture eats strategy for breakfast” was a famous saying by late business management guru Peter Drucker.
Apologies to Peter, but I’d go so far as to say that love beats both culture and strategy for breakfast any day of the week.
Why is it so important for customers to love, rather than just like, a brand?
When customers love a brand, they become fans. They happily stake their own reputations on recommending that brand. When customers like a brand, they might enjoy its products -- and perhaps give the brand a thumbs up on Facebook -- but they’re not invested and they don’t go out of their way to share, whether digitally or in person.
As a result of this divide, the internet is filled with shortcut articles and webinars on how you can build brands that customers don’t just like, they love.
Having worked for a few love-worthy brands -- including a 10-year stint at Apple -- I can tell you there is no shortcut. The truth is, just as you can’t create great personal relationships if you don’t love yourself first, you can't create great customer relationships if you don’t look inside your company first.
The Secret Love Behind Apple’s Turnaround
In Apple’s case, Steve Jobs started by investing his own love into the company itself. Some of this love came from unexpected places. After dropping out of higher education, he hung around Reed College in Oregon where he dropped in on classes about calligraphy, of all things.
"I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture,” Jobs said when he gave Stanford's 2005 graduation speech.
That love of calligraphy came back to inspire the Mac: "When we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography."
In other words, Steve combined his love of calligraphy with his love of style and attention to detail to create a computer he himself would love.
I joined Apple in 1999, a tough time for the organization that would get even tougher over the next few years. Apple had lost its market share to competitors running Microsoft Windows, as well as its reputation for excellence. Making matters even worse was a financial market meltdown, the dot-com collapse and a looming recession.
Throughout this period, Steve would regularly gather the troops at company all-hands meetings and proselytize that Apple was going to prosper again in the future. The key, he said, was to continue innovating, to continue to put love into designing products. If there was one thing that drove us, it was generating love at first sight. While others were laying off and de-investing in R&D, Apple was doubling down. When the economy recovered, we were banking on a seismic shuffle of the players at the top of the competition. And Steve’s plan was for Apple to seize the moment.
He was right.
Steve and many people at Apple loved music. He took that love to spearhead development of the iPod. However, rather than launch it as an ultra-portable MP3 player, Steve framed it in simple terms: “1000 songs in your pocket.” As Jobs put it at Apple’s iPod launch event in 2001, Apple had chosen music as the first area to branch out of its traditional computer business and enter new product categories: “Why music? We love music. And it’s always good to do something you love.”
Microsoft was quick to copy Apple’s idea and came up with their own MP3 player: the Zune. Despite their near monopoly status in the computer world and awe-inspiring marketing budget, the Zune was an epic failure.
The time was right. The technology was right. The Zune should have been a success. So what was missing? As Jobs recounted to author Walter Isaccson:
“The Zune was crappy because the people at Microsoft don't really love music or art the way we do. We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves, and when you're doing something for yourself, or your best friend or family, you're not going to cheese out.”
In the years following the iPod, the company turned from the brink to be one of the biggest and most loved in the world.
The Same Secret Love
Today, I work for a company that brings teams together via high-quality audio and video conferencing and content sharing solutions. Our co-founder is a musician who credits his love of music -- fueled by his mother’s piano lessons as a boy -- as a key part of the company's success. He couldn’t let himself create a speakerphone that had anything less than supersonic audio capabilities.
As an engineer, he says you can only go so far before you hit a roadblock. But as an engineer and a musician, he says the music side helps give him a “gut feel” of where to take things.
Loving Yourself First
So if you’re thinking of starting a business or you’re already a leader, think about what it is that you love before you start searching the internet or attending courses. Your business is never going to succeed unless you love what you do.
When you love what you do and create the types of products and experiences you’d want as a customer yourself, only then will you have a chance of not just gaining customers and making money, but spreading the love.
