Apple is a cult company - a tribal brand. It has passionate support in terms of depth, if not always in breadth. As the only slightly cynical Courtney Thorpe put it in a post on Gizmodo "You Apple fan-boys . . . Apple could put out a brick and tell you it's an iPhone, and you would buy it". When Apple messes up, it's a big problem for the brand.
The iPhone 4 antenna problem was mishandled by Apple, and badly so. It may even have revealed a problem which goes to the heart of the company's business model. The first word that most people associate with Apple products is 'cool'. This is far from a bad thing, and it is not to say that Apple has not been a technical innovator, it has. But it is more Mercedes Benz than Ford. Apple's early adoption of the use of icons, mouse-controls, pull down menus, etc. did not change computing. It is when Microsoft mass produced these things that the world began to change. The real marker of Apple products is not that they are better than those of their competitors, it is that they are cooler. This, rather than product performance, is the real USP.
This is where the iPhone 4 problem becomes critical. According to Bloomberg, Apple engineers identified problems with iPhone 4 antenna in 2009, and alerted CEO, Steve Jobs, at the time. This is worrying, because Apple at first insisted that there was no real problem, or at least nothing that wasn't common to all smart phones. The company later conceded that there was a problem, and offered a free fix. But there is worse to come. Apple angrily denied Bloomberg's story to the Wall Street Journal, but Journal sources confirmed that Apple knew about the problem a year before it admitted them, but Jobs overruled the engineers because he liked the design.
If true, this goes to the heart of Apple's business model. If there is a conflict between cool and product performance, and Apple prefers cool, this will shake the loyalty of the most devoted fans.
And it is the nature of Apple's products that they are particularly vulnerable to their image in social media. They are not selling SAGA holidays or Stannah stairlifts. Their customers are big-time users of social media.
The excellent Mike Regester, of Regester Larkin, offers three rules of crisis management: "Tell the truth; tell it all; tell it now". Apple, perhaps more than most companies, cannot afford to break those rules. Like a jilted lover, those 'fan-boys' could make the short leap from love to hate.
Apple needs to tread very carefully. Any further errors on this scale will lead to the company being torn apart right across social media.
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