#parislemon

It has been a while since I refreshed the theme for this site. That, coupled with a number of complaints of the site loading too slowly (a trendy complaint these days, it seems), led to today’s new coat of paint. 

I just read the above quote this morning - it’s a Tim Cook quote, or at least I've lifted it from a longer Tim Cook quote that I read on a post from parislemon​. (edit: it is originally from this fastcompany article, here)

This is an incredibly bold approach to business and probably goes a long way to explaining why Apple are on the verge of having a market capitalisation of one trillion US Dollars (that's a one with twelve zeros after it).

Having said that, it is not an easy position to adopt, whether in wider business strategy or in your communications approach. Not in a world where everything is weighed and measured.

In digital there is an addiction, or at least a desire - no a lust - to measure.  We can track behaviour, we can re-target. The platforms and media sellers give us in depth metrics around CTR’s or impressions, engagements, visits, bounce rates, open rates and on and on it goes.

Now, to be sure, there is valuable insight within these numbers. I myself spend more time than I ever imagined looking at excel documents jammed with numbers.  (Side note: I was never particularly enamoured with numbers at school and my results showed this,  It didn't help that I did double majors in English and Drama - this didn't leave a lot of time for maths. It was the eighties and no-one really knew the volumes of data that were about to be unleashed).

Anyway - here we are trying to capture the imaginations of consumers, to inspire them to action, to build affinity or preference or to be that one ad, of anywhere between a few hundred to a few thousand ads the average person is exposed to everyday, that leaps out and actually moves someone.

It is here, this delta between measurement (of everything) and creative, design and inspiration that there is friction.  All the metrics are great measures of behaviour.This is all good and all valuable and if you’re lucky you have a team or an agency of data analysts who pour through all this to deliver some insight.

But sometimes - and this is where we get back to the @tim_cook quote - sometimes you need to trust your creative instinct.  Yes be informed by data, but if your gut says try the opposite then try it, at least test it. (Always check first  that you’re not an egocentric megalomaniac who thinks everyone in the world should behave like you).  It’s sometimes better to beg forgiveness than to ask permission.

Over on Medium, tech guru M.G. Siegler discusses coming changes in the TV industry wrought by the internet, as well as by new players such as Apple shaking up the status quo. I agree with much of what he says. This bit jumped out at me, though:

Another side effect is that certain channels, when unbundled, are going to die. Those handful of channels myself and the majority of others want…

In an effort to be more of a producer and less of a consumer, and being inspired by Andy Ihnatko’s “The very least I could do” series, I am going to attempt to write something each week and share it with all of you.

For the inaugural effort, I’ve got a two-parter on something I’ve given a lot of thought to recently: the fate of Radio Shack.

This past week I’ve come across two very different plans for saving Radio Shack, and they couldn’t be more different from each other. In part one I’m going to discuss how Radio shack could be the “Apple Store for everything else” and in part two, I’ll discuss how Radio Shack can re-embrace its roots and be at the forefront of the maker revolution.

Part One: The Apple Store for everything.  The first plan to save Radio Shack comes from MG Siegler, at his blog parislemon. He argues that Radio Shack should become the Apple Store for everything else, with a smattering of cool new technologies like 3d printers.

Displaying “The Best” I really think this could work, provided Radio Shack has the discipline to display only “The Best”. There are so many products I wish I could visit a store and feel and compare in person. But they’re made by different companies and sold primarily online, so I just pour over dozens and dozens of reviews hoping to find what works best for me. How much better would the experience be if I could spend at least a few minutes with an actual functioning object, be it that new camera I’m wondering about or the screen I want to buy for my computer.

You may be thinking “Best Buy already does this”. Really though, they don’t. The stores are huge, they have tons of junk that isn’t any good, and the staff are nitwits who either accost you or can’t be found to save your life. 

Finally, what about showrooming? Well, that’s going to happen, so they might as well embrace it, knowing that it’s an opportunity to get people back into their stores for something. (This is also where displaying cool things like 3D printers and scanners comes in.) As I’ll discuss below, there are also other ways to mitigate the issue. 

Doing the rest A reasonably-priced paid “genius bar” type service only for products that they sell would be a transformative experience for anything not sold by Apple, and Radio Shack stores are the right size and have a good retail footprint to make this a reality. They’re small, and they’re found in most reasonably sized cities in America, far more widespread than even Apple stores.