Trust your instincts ...

The old adage says that the customer is always right, but Steve Jobs’ attitude to his Apple customers was a complex one. On the one hand, his entire career was geared to providing them with products so far beyond their expectations that they had never imagined they might want or need them. On the other hand, he believed that it was his duty to know more than they did about what could be done and how it could best be achieved, so he spent little time in consultation with them.

It was a philosophy echoing that of Dr Land at Polaroid, who wrote, way back in 1945: ‘I believe it is pretty well established now that neither the intuition of the sales manager nor even the first reaction of the public is a reliable measure of the value of a product to the consumer. Very often the best way to find out whether something is worth making is to make it, distribute it, and then to see, after the product has been around a few years, whether it was worth the trouble.’

The market research Jobs put most faith in was what happened at the tills once a product had been launched. If the market performance was weak it was a sign that the product was wrong and there were issues to address. Similarly, he would respond to specific weaknesses identified by users. For instance, when it became evident that a significant proportion of Macs were crashing when users activated Flash, Jobs made sure that Flash was dropped from a suite of Apple products, despite a long relationship with the application’s creators, Adobe.

He always remained convinced that you cannot design by focus group. He once famously noted: ‘You can’t just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them. By the time you get it built, they’ll want something new.’ On another occasion he expanded on the subject: ‘It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.’

For Jobs, the design process began with the end-user experience and worked backwards. It was the job of a great designer with a great imagination to envisage that experience – not the job of the consumer.

... but respect your customers

Of course, this was a strategy that inevitably failed on occasion – which is why we remember the Mac or the iPod much more vividly than we do the Lisa or the Cube – but it was also an attitude that could sometimes rile the Apple fan base. Jobs himself acknowledged that others accused him of not listening to his customers enough and admitted that it was a complaint with some validity. In 2010 an embarrassing flaw with the iPhone 4 came to light: if the device was held in a certain way, calls could be lost. Jobs, no doubt struggling with his health issues by then, famously responded to one customer complaint on the subject by describing it as nonsense and telling the correspondent not to hold the phone in that particular way. His comments were probably no more than the manifestation of a fit of pique but it did emphasize Jobs’ distance from the classic ‘customer is always right’ ethos.

However, given the number of customers who to this day are convinced that Jobs was always right, it is difficult to believe that either the company or the consumer would have benefitted from a culture in which prospective buyers were asked for their opinion during the creative process. It is almost unimaginable that a focus group would ever have come up with something as great as the iPod or the iPhone. Much more likely is that it would have imagined something far less impressive. Thank goodness Jobs did not settle for meeting lower expectations. As he once demanded of a quizzing journalist: ‘Do you think Alexander Graham Bell ever did market research ahead of inventing the telephone?’