Apple Hasn't Lost Its Simplicity without Steve Jobs, Says Ken Segall | Big Think

Apple Hasn't Lost Its Simplicity without Steve Jobs, Says Ken Segall

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One thing Apple has mastered is the art of simplicity. Few would know how the company achieved this better than Ken Segall, a creative director at Apple for twelve years who was personally responsible for introducing the lowercase-i into Apple's product line: iMac, iPod, iPad, etc. Simplicity permeates all aspects of Apple, perhaps most crucially — for the bottom line, at least — the buyer's shopping experience.

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KEN SEGALL:

Ken Segall is the author of the New York Times bestseller Insanely Simple. Working with Steve Jobs as his ad agency's creative director for twelve years spanning NeXT and Apple, he led the team behind Apple's legendary Think different campaign, and set Apple down the i-way by naming the iMac. Segall has also served as agency global creative director for IBM, Intel, Dell, and BMW. He is an international speaker on the power of simplicity, and frequently appears on cable and Internet news for his marketing insights.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Ken Segall:  If you look at the products and services that exist in this world, sometimes it is truly staggering the number of choices that people are given. There is this feeling, again, amongst people that I've spoke to who are known champions of simplicity that too much choice can actually stifle a customer's enthusiasm or stall the selling process because you're just giving them too much to think about. So I just do my own casual research and because I'm a techie kind of a guy I look at Dell's website versus HP's and then Apples and it is quite extraordinary. If you look at Dell's website I think these numbers are slightly wrong but I'm pretty sure I'm right, 26 distinct models of laptops, this was a couple months ago when I last looked, HP has 41 I believe it is an Apple has three. And what's extraordinary is if you look at the PC category share of market Apple never gets more than like ten percent, but because they do these fewer things better their share of the profit in the category is actually more than HP and Dell combined.

So that lack of choice isn't really hurting Apple at all. You might even say it's helping them. You don't want to dumb things down and you don't want to get people to feel like they don't have enough choice, but you want to give them the right choices as opposed to infinite choices. You want to make it easier for them; simpler. So I think Apple has done a terrific job of that and there are other companies in the world that treat their customers in that way where it's actually a way of giving a customer more respect and demonstrating that you understand what drives them. Because you're not saying we don't know what you want so here's 40 things to choose from, we're saying we get that you have this particular need and this is a great solution for you. And that proves to customers that you share their values. And when a person feels that a company shares their values they tend to give them their business and that makes them more loyal customers.

There's been a lot of concern out there for Apple these days that maybe it's losing its sense of simplicity. Steve Jobs is gone and Tim Cook doesn't share those same values, whatever; that product lines are getting bigger and it's less simple to choose what you're looking for; product naming could be an issue. Now this is where I'm going to start sounding, if I haven't already, like an Apple fanboy. I don't mean to because I try to be objective. But I think a lot of it is the result of Apple just being the most over analyzed company on earth. Because if you look at what they're doing, compared to what other companies are doing, it is vastly similar. I think what the real issue is is that audiences mature. Apple has tens of millions more customers today than it did when Steve Jobs was CEO. And there's a wide range of needs. People say Steve would never do that with certain things, when in fact Steve did do that.

The iPod was this revolution changed the way we listen to and discover music and it was a super big hit. And then a couple years later they are four iPods and nobody had any problem with that because that was Steve Jobs doing it. So now we had a tremendous hit of an iPhone and now there are three models of iPhones. They still got one more to go before it is as bad as iPod was. But the reason they had all those iPods and the reason they have all these iPhones is become each one is for a distinctl...

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