Musings of a Marketing Maven

I love my iPhone not just because it’s an object of beauty in its own right, but because the expe­ri­ence of using it is so plea­sur­able, so much of the time.

It feels great in my hand: the curved shape, the weight bal­ance, and the tac­tile feel of the mate­ri­als. I smile at the way it sounds when some­one calls me or an alert chimes to remind me of an upcom­ing meeting.

The user inter­face for voice calls has been thought­fully designed, so when I’m on a call and a new one comes in, the UI offers sen­si­ble options for how to han­dle those calls. I don’t have to remem­ber any silly key com­bi­na­tion in order to jug­gle mul­ti­ple calls.

The hi-res dis­play is fab­u­lous, and I love the way images are ren­dered, whether mine or those pro­vided by Apple. Every­thing about the prod­uct says its qual­ity is more than skin deep.

A Model for Others?

Experts in inter­ac­tion design and brand expe­ri­ence undoubt­edly look at the iPhone launch as a case study in how to con­vey brand attrib­utes through­out every aspect of a prod­uct, its mar­ket­ing and the consumer’s usage experience.

Speak­ing for myself… My expe­ri­ence of acti­vat­ing the phone and port­ing my mobile num­ber from one car­rier to another was sim­ple and flaw­less. The self-service online approach was fast, easy to under­stand and visu­ally ele­gant: every­thing that Apple has “trained” me to expect as a cus­tomer over 20+ years.

The user inter­ac­tion model had Apple’s fin­ger­marks all over it. Although I hear the behind-the-scenes car­rier work was messy, the way Apple and AT&T man­aged the self-service acti­va­tion process should be an inspi­ra­tion for other technology-based con­sumer services.

Part of the magic of the iPhone comes from the way Apple has man­aged the brand expe­ri­ence at all the con­sumer touch­points, from point of sale through acti­va­tion to usage and main­te­nance. (Not to men­tion the way they whipped the early adopter and ana­lyst com­mu­nity into a frenzy dur­ing the long wait for the device to arrive in the stores.)

iPhone ver­sus Treo

Before buy­ing an iPhone, I was a frus­trated Treo user (after a long love affair with ear­lier Palm OS devices).

In my first 90 days as an iPhone user, Apple has already updated the iPhone 3 times, with notice­able improve­ments each time. This com­pares to the 2 years I had to wait before Palm, Access and Ver­i­zon fixed the bugs in the Treo 700p that caused it to crash all the time. The firmware updat­ing process is sim­ple, if you’re used to using an iPod; and requires much less effort from the user than the equiv­a­lent process on the Treo.

Com­pared to the Treo’s lim­ited capa­bil­i­ties for email han­dling and web brows­ing, I’ll put up with EDGE in order to have an email envi­ron­ment that’s actu­ally use­ful. Mes­sages are clear, well pre­sented and nicely for­mat­ted. And you can actu­ally use the web browser!

Synch­ing an iPhone works just fine, espe­cially com­pared to what I expe­ri­enced using Ver­i­zon Wire­less, a Treo 700p, and a POP email account with 500+ con­tact records. I must have done a dozen hard resets on the Treo in order to fix the dupli­cates and trip­li­cates caused by the poor qual­ity synch­ing util­ity that Ver­i­zon deliv­ers to its cus­tomers. To make mat­ters worse, those prob­lems would work their way back into my Out­look file if I made the mis­take of synch­ing the Treo to the PC with­out check­ing to see if Verizon’s ser­vice had intro­duced dupli­cates again.

So far (first 90 days) I’ve had no prob­lems synch­ing the iPhone to a PC — and I’m using Plaxo to syn­chro­nize Out­look 2007 cal­en­dars, con­tacts and to-do’s across two PCs. It all works like a charm, and I don’t have to waste my time main­tain­ing what’s on my phone.

It just works — and pro­vides plea­sure dur­ing its var­i­ous inter­ac­tions with me.

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