Jason Snell:
Apple’s most valuable asset is its brand. Not its real estate,
not its intellectual property, not even any particular product.
Even the mighty iPhone has no value if, over time, the traits
that differentiate it from competitor products are erased.
Apple’s brand has always stood for higher quality products — you
pay more, but you get more. Apple has never wanted to be the
low-price leader. It didn’t put stickers on the first Intel
Macs to get some marketing dollars from Intel. It doesn’t
load up new Macs with loads of lousy bundled third-party software
like so many PCs do.
Those are choices Apple has made that cost the company revenue,
but they’ve got a bigger purpose. They reinforce the brand.
Opting not to add more revenue to the bottom line is a difficult
choice for anyone working at a profit-driven corporation.
Great minds write about the same topic on the same day.
What Snell’s column makes clear is that the incremental revenue Apple is gaining from putting shitty ads in its software comes at a price. They’re withdrawals from Apple’s brand equity. The brand equity that Apple is losing by foisting these ads is more valuable than the marginal dollars they’re earning from them. There’s juice, yes, but it’s a perfect case of the juice not being worth the squeeze.
It shouldn’t be easy for users to simply imagine obvious ways for Apple’s software to improve. But it’s trivial for any user to imagine an obvious way for the App Store to be better: take out the ads from search results. If there were a preference setting to remove ads from App Store search results, everyone would turn that on. Apple is doing a thing that obviously makes the experience worse. It’s a little thing. The experience is only a little worse. But getting all the little things right is how you get to insanely great, and insanely great is Apple’s North Star.
Apple’s competition is lousy with ads. Downright lousy. Apple seems to be choosing the route of “Don’t like ads? Choose Apple, we shove fewer of them in your face.” That’s way less bracingly clear a marketing message than “Don’t like ads? Choose Apple, we don’t shove any ads in your face.” If your competitors’ stores all smell pervasively of dogshit, don’t aim to have the store that smells the least like shit. Aim to have a store that smells pristine. “Our stores only carry a vague whiff of dogshit” is not insanely great.