How a customer-focused product strategy made Apple the top tech company

A product is a tangible thing that satisfies a need or want in 4 classifications – Convenience, Shopping, Speciality and Unsought products.

A product has 3 levels. When a product is developed, it focuses on a core benefit…

… but the real magic occurs in the 2 stages after the core product development.   The ‘actual product’ stage of physical design, branding, packaging, and labelling and then the final ‘augmentation’ stage with support services and guarantees.  All of these create the final finished product.

I hate to use the obvious example, but, if we’re talking packaging and design differentiation, nobody beats Apple.  Apple is known for its obsession with design and packaging.

Jony Ive is an English-American industrial and product designer… and he was also the former Chief Design Officer of Apple during the Jobs era.  One of the Apple design obsession stories is that Jony spent a year extensively testing and deciding on the Apple Watch straps to make sure it fitted beautifully on your wrist. (Incidentally I tell you all these great accolades being an Android girl myself).  

Packaging provides several purposes.  These can be functional – Protection, Convenience, Information; and Promotional to communicate features, brand Image and positioning that Differentiates it from competitors.  For Apple, packaging is a sensory experience for touch and sight.

The Apple customer experience (CX) starts with the packaging. They make an experience out of the unboxing making a new product purchase feel like Christmas.  There are a lot of customers out there who keep all their Apple product packaging because it looks nice.

Packaging engages and draws consumers in and, most importantly, it communicates the premium brand positioning without any words.  Perfume bottles follow a similar focus to make the bottle design iconic.

Apple’s obsession with packaging means it doesn’t outsource this to a packaging company, but rather employs a packaging designer. The designer creates and tests endless versions of box shape, angles and tapes.

It also creates expectation and excitement by the time you reach the product inside the box and its likely you won’t even remember the benefits that you’ve researched and just admire this sleek device.

The gestalt theory of perception attempts to explain the way the human brain interprets information about relationships and hierarchy in a design or image based on visual cues like proximity, similarity, and closure.  Apple is a master of gestalt providing clear cues about the Apple brand. In fact a buying behavioral study performed in 2014 published in the European Journal of Scientific Research describes: “…the packaging is perceived to be part of the product and it can be difficult for consumers to separate the two (the concept of gestalt).”

Perception Research Services state that visibility is directly connected to purchase levels and is a key reason why 80 percent of new retail products fail.  Well-designed packaging creates a sensory response which is recalled every time the product is used.