Customer Intimacy 2.0 @ Apple – How Leading New Economy Businesses Handle Customer Intimacy

Is Apple’s strategy based on listening to its customers? How about that of Amazon.com? Neither of these companies is traditionally seen as being customer intimate. There aren’t any sales reps out there developing deep relationships with customers, but there are other ways to be customer intimate. Both Apple and Amazon strive to maximize their understanding of how customers use their products. They’ve built big, loyal customer bases.

Apple is built on the design instincts of Steve Jobs, and the company strives to have the easiest to use, most elegant products wherever it plays. In the traditional sense of strategy, Apple is a differentiator. Look at the company’s envoys into retail however, which is a customer-intimacy-enabling play.

Smartly, the Apple stores align with the traditional strategy of the company: the stores are just as differentiated as the product. Elegance is the best word to describe both the iPod and the company’s flagship Manhattan store. 

Apple’s stores serve two purposes for customer intimacy. The first is simply a control issue, wherein a competitive advantage stems from access to point of sale information in-house and oversight of the people/place that customers interact with salespeople. Second, the stores’ Genius Bars offers Apple a chance for personal connection. Customers can get their products fixed, learn about the technology or gain customizations that are tailored for what they want to get done with the products. The Apple store offers a retail angle on intimacy, and I suspect that the stores allow Apple to learn a great deal about how customers are using its products.

Further, Apple’s increasing ownership of the functionality on its iPhone platform. Playing the game of its rival, Apple is rumored to be replacing Google’s mapping features for mobile. Collecting the data directly from users in this key function offers greater insights into customer behavior.

In all, customer intimacy isn’t happening the way it used to.  Apple has a unique strategy here for getting close to customers, providing value and extracting insights for upcoming generations of products.