James Wilding's Weblog

How do companies like Apple to get a massive foothold in a market that they’ve previously had no involvement in? By relentlessly focusing on customer experience.

Take the iPhone: there are plenty of mobile manufacturers out there, but before the iPhone the whole market was a complacent mess. Before the iPhone, there was no world-class customer experience in the mobile phone market. I’ll put it another way: until Apple came along, no-one in the mobile phone market was doing a good enough job. Many people would have loved to switch phones, but they didn’t have a better option.

When a business which can provide that better option comes along, wow — everyone else gets blown out of the water. It makes me wonder: how many businesses are just sleep-walking through corporate life, waiting for a keener competitor to come along and give them a nasty wake-up call?

If you’re a small business, you’re lucky: you have a much greater chance of failing if you don’t focus relentlessly on your customers, so there’s an incentive to concentrate on what’s important right from the start. There are no million-dollar savings accounts to fall back on, no equity in property, no investors — just you and your customers. Give those customers what they really want, and you’ll be a great position to compete with the sleep-walking giants around you.