Guess what? Apple is “not perfect”. That’s what CEO Steve Jobs had to say on Friday after calling an emergency press conference to ease the minds of the thousands of tech journo’s across the globe that the iPhone 4 was in fact, not broken or being recalled.
Yes, it has antenna issues. However, those issues affect just 0.55% of Apple’s 3 million iPhone 4 users.
It appears that this antenna malarkey was just blown up by the media. One person called to complain and the media jumped on the problem like a fat kid on a cupcake. Poor Apple, success just doesn’t sell well these days. Consumers…well, the media, seems to favour the bad news and ignite panic. Take for example Google’s financial results reported on Friday.
We received the results too and reported them on UTalkMarketing. They were positive results. The company’s revenues and profits are up (you can read the nitty gritties here) but they are not up enough to please some with most of the media outlets reporting Google’s “disappointing” results.
But back to Apple. Jobs has promised every iPhone user a free case to help with the antenna issues – which, by the way, exist in all smartphones including RIM’s Blackberry.
He seemed a little upset in his presentation. Upset about how quickly you can go from being the most popular kid in the playground to the most hated, money making corporation.
Jobs just wants to make his users happy. And he’s fixing things to make them happy.
I watched the presentation on the internet (because my actual invite was lost in the mail) and I couldn’t help thinking though, if the answer is so simple – to send a free case out to users – why wasn’t there an email marketing campaign?
I frequently get email marketing messages from Apple telling me about new products and product updates, so why not this time?
Jobs was, as usual playing it smart. He wasn’t speaking to users, he was speaking to the media. He was advertising the Apple brand with a new “we love you, Apple user” message that doesn’t quite sound the same in an email. Jobs was advertising the fact that Apple, regardless of how unbelievably successful (selling 3 million iPhone 4s in 3 weeks) it is or becomes, will always go to great lengths to satisfy its customers.
And what a great ad it was…it had me at “not perfect”.
