Friday, April 29, 2005

Crowd control

So I stopped by the Apple store at 6:15 this evening, to take a look at the new OS 10.4 Tiger that just went on sale. The store was full, security was directing people to get into a line that stretched down the hall. Could have been 100 or so people waiting in line, and I don't have that kind of patience. I'll look at the software demo another day.

But I can't help but marvel at Apple's success in getting people so excited about a piece of software that, at the end of the day, doesn't do anything! Sure, it's the foundation for the rest of the Mac apps--but those are already working just fine!

What can trust marketers learn from Apple's example?
Posted by Jim Gust at 8:56 PM

2 comments:

JLM said...

Doesn't do anything? What about Spotlight, a feature of Mac OS 10.4 praised by Walter Mossberg and other reviewers? Spotlight's awesome ability to search for anything on the user's computer didn't sound like a big deal at first, but I can see that it will be one. Well-organized computer users have everything properly filed in folders within folders within folders, etc. With OS 10.4 Tiger, all that neatness becomes redundant. Sloppy, disorganized computers users will be able to find almost any file, including e-mails and images, almost instantly. If blogger Gust' computer filing system is anything like his office filing system, he will be a major beneficiary of Tiger's Spotlight feature.

What marketers can learn from is the existence of the Apple stores. Cool, hip ministores are a trend. Trust departments used to set themselves apart by creating elaborately furnished quarters upstairs in banks. Today's wealth-management marketers might create the modern equivalent of the coffee houses in which merchants used to gather centures ago. I can see it now: A chain of BigBucks coffee houses with brokers behind the counter and a trust administrator as cashier. Wireless internet access, of course. And IRA rollover seminars instead of poetry readings.

10:11 AM
Jim Gust said...

I went back to the Apple store, and the crowds have subsided. Spotlight on a G-5 equipped computer does create the tingle. I wanted to know more about Dashboard, so I activated Spotlight and after I typed the "d" and the "a" and a half second delay I had over 2,000 hits listed. Each additional letter narrowed the list instantly.

Still, the utility of nested folders will remain, because they'll always be more convenient in the open and save dialogue boxes. The ability to include shortcuts in those contexts is almost as useful as Spotlight.

BTW, I've read that Spotlight's performance on older Macs is considerable less nimble, so much so that some are lobbying for a way to delay the beginning of the search until more than two letters have been entered.

I like the idea of the wealth management division being a brand within a brand. It does suggest a thoroughly empowered client base--do most trust customers have Wireless internet already?

11:04 AM

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