Apple is screwing up.
The assumption, of course, is that Apple and Steve Jobs are the most incredible company-CEO combination on earth. We know Jobs is the king of spin, the purveyor of change and innovation, and he's like Teflon. Noting negative sticks. Everyone loves Apple and Steve Jobs.
When the U.S. government went after Microsoft, everyone was rooting for the government. But when reports circulated that the FTC is considering an investigation of Apple, most everyone started rooting for Apple. Why? Because no one wants this continuous string of cool toys to end. After all, no one in history has slammed so many products out of the park, one after another, year after year.
The iPhone 4 is, of course, the next cool release following the cool release of the iPad. More is in store from Apple as it reinvents online advertising. Yet its spin on the iPhone 4's reception problems is... well... just that. Spin. And it's making people upset.
If you've not followed this PR nightmare, perhaps you've watched Apple's stock take a dramatic drop over it. In short, iPhone 4 users are having problems with signal strength and dropped calls, and a lot of people suspect it has to do with the phone's wraparound antenna design. First, Apple blamed AT&T. Then they confirmed that there is a problem if the phones are held a certain way (some users call it the "death grip") and said people should be careful not to cover one corner of the iPhone's case, adding that any mobile phone will have problems when held in certain ways. Then, last week, Apple said the real problem is that the iPhone 4 -- and all previous iPhones -- have been displaying the wrong number of signal-strength bars, and a software update will fix the problem.
The company that no one thought could screw up has screwed up big time, and it's making a lot of customers mad. The ultimate outcome is yet to be seen, but Apple has been responding with spin instead of transparency.
I doubt this will bring Apple down. They would have to make a lot more big mistakes to lose their shine. But I do think they have handled this badly. In today's world of comment boxes, bulletin boards, and Twitter feeds, transparency is critical. Spin no longer works because consumer voices are louder than company voices.
A couple of years ago, I made a decision regarding one of my other magazines, and I received no negative market feedback. No e-mails, no nasty phone calls. Everything seemed to be just fine, until one friend suggested I might want to read what was being said on a particular discussion board. Not only did I have no idea what was being said, I hadn't even known that board existed. And its members were slamming me and my company for our decision.
In the pre-Internet world, most CEOs would have either ignored this kind of chatter or would have laid out some company spin. In this case, I decided the best way to deal with it was to tell the complete, transparent truth. I laid out why we made the decision, why we felt bad about it but still felt we needed to do it, etc. The end result was that a negative got turned into a positive. By staying in the conversation and addressing negatives head on and allowing a dialogue to develop, we completely defused what could have become a bad situation.
That's what Apple and Jobs should have done. People may not like the truth but they would much rather hear “We screwed up and we're going to find a way to fix it" than some bogus PR scheme that no one will believe anyway. It's true for Apple, it's true for me, and it's true for your radio station. Today you have to be in the middle of the conversation to know what is being said about you, and you need to be transparent.
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