I've been thinking a lot about brand behavior lately. For whatever reason, it seems like we've been getting a lot of demonstrations of brand behavior at both ends of the spectrum lately. While there are a lot of ways to measure a Good Brand or Bad Brand, this is about seeing a business doing things that make me (and others) think, "in a choice for products or services, I would choose this one. They have earned my loyalty."
With that, I thought I would share a few observations and experiences.
Patagonia
I got my first Patagonia clothing item back in the mid-1980s, a set of Capilene thermal underwear. It was a gift purchase for me to help keep me warm riding my bicycle in the cold months. They've seen many miles and many adventures over the years. They are a bit threadbare now, so when I wear thermal underwear, I usually choose some newer Capilene layers.
It's just a layer of clothing, but even now as I think about them, it makes me smile. They are a dear old trusted friend, something I've counted on over and over again. Patagonia understood the product requirements and they made something great — and given a choice between a Patagonia product and something similar, I've often chosen Patagonia because of those thermals.
More recently, maybe 2016 or so, I got a Patagonia hoodie. It's nothing particularly remarkable, just a basic hoodie. I think I may have bought it at Nordstrom Rack or some other discounted retail location. I remember at the time thinking that it wasn't really my style, as it had a large Patagonia logo on the back — a little too much logo flash for me. However, before long it found it's way into regular rotation in my clothing choices, it was a little heavier and warmer than a couple of other hoodies, but it was still a basic hoodie that packed easily and made for a nice layer.
About a year and a half or so back, I noticed that my Patagonia hoodie was getting a little long in the tooth. The cuffs around the arms were fraying and holes were forming. The elbow area on one of the arms was also starting to get a hole. It was a sad day when I had to retire my now loved Patagonia hoodie from regular service. As I read about Patagonia's Worn Wear program, I wondered if it was something that they could repair.
Earlier this year, we finally made it over to the Patagonia outlet store in Santa Cruz with my hoodie. As it happened, we found our way to the store in the middle of a big winter sale, so the store was packed and crazy. Despite the madness, we were able to catch one of the Patagonia store team, talk to them about my hoodie, and get directed to the register where they logged my hoodie into their Worn Wear program. The speculated that they might be able to fix it, but asked if I wanted it back if they couldn't repair it.
Flash forward a month or two and I got my Patagonia hoodie back. They replaced the cuffs (a slight variation in the color) and sewed / reinforced the elbow area. It's my hoodie and they fixed it. They fixed it!
Patagonia didn't charge me for the repair. They didn't charge me for shipping. They just repaired my hoodie.
From a business numbers standpoint, it doesn't make sense. It's a loss for them. They did work, they didn't get money. They shipped stuff. They didn't get money. A stupid worn out, mostly cotton hoodie. And they fixed it.
Is Patagonia's clothing priced higher than fast fashion and other clothing options? Definitely. But at this point, if I'm looking for an article of clothing that Patagonia might make, I'm going to look at what options that they have and consider them. I find that there's a value in their products that goes far beyond the sticker price.
Who knows what it was that brought Apple to current Macbook Pro design. Perhaps it was the years of technical headaches like the butterfly keyboards, perhaps it was a growing awareness of a significant body of professional users who were holding onto their old pre-2015 systems instead of opting for USB-C charging Touchbar foolishness. Whatever it was, when Apple brought back Magsafe charging and a healthy number of ports to the Macbook Pro in 2022, I finally let go of my of my old system and upgraded my laptop. It didn't hurt that the battery had swollen on my Macbook Pro, distorting the enclosure and leaving me worried that the system might spontaneously combust.
My Macbook Pro isn't the only Apple device I need to replace or upgrade, but sadly, it seems like it's one of the few Apple designs that are aligned with my needs.
My current iPhone is an original iPhone SE. Often, when people see it these days, they're like, "what is that?" At one point, I had tried an upgrade to the iPhone Xs, but the lack of a home button made the device extremely frustrating to use. Back then, my wife pointed me to a way to use the accessibility features to create a soft home button, which helped, but didn't save it. I ended up switching the SIM card out and going back to my old iPhone SE, using the iPhone Xs as a camera (it was a good camera). I even upgraded my original 64GB iPhone SE to a 128GB model I was able to find online.
I kept hoping that the iPhone SE2 would keep the body style and features of the original iPhone SE, but when it was announced — and it was basically an iPhone 8 — I knew I wouldn't be getting a new SE. Sure, it still had a home button, but they got rid of the headphone jack and the lens protruded from the back. My iPhone SE is probably the last Apple iPhone that doesn't really need a case to protect the device.
Since that time, I've upgraded my iPhone Xs (a camera) to an iPhone 13 Pro that is still, just a camera. I don't use it for calls. I don't use it for listening to music, even though I have Airpods. If Apple sold something like it that was a smaller and lighter top-tier camera (like the old iPod Touch), I'd probably consider one of those instead. The iPhone Mini models, that have since been cancelled, were tempting for their smaller, more appropriate size, but the lower grade camera and the lack of a headphone jack kept me from switching to that device as my all-in-one phone.
The iPhone 13 Pro is also full of features that I don't use — the wireless charging is just about useless for me, and the absence of a fingerprint sensor is inconvenient whenever you need to wear a mask or when you're outside wearing sunglasses. Did I mention that I hate the volume/power button configuration?
With the way the various model designs have been going, I don't expect the iPhone to ever return to the type of design that I would use. That branch of development seems to have closed and we're stuck with oversized devices without industry-standard headphone jacks going forward. I've resigned myself to knowing that my best hope is to replace my battery again, sometime in the future.
The Disappointing Design Direction for the iPad Line
My iPad is an old 10.5" iPad Pro. When I purchased it, I liked to use it to view (and sometimes color-correct) images. These days, I mostly use it to stream various video services. It's been about six or seven years since I got this iPad, and the battery is failing. I've had it on flights and been unable to stream more than about 2 hours of content before the battery dies. I'd probably replace the battery, but when we've tried to do that, we've wound up with iPads that don't work right any longer. Even though the battery issue was becoming a problem last year, every time I look at upgrades, I give up.
Sadly, the iPad upgrade path is the barrier that keeps me from upgrading. In one respect, I'd like to switch to a new iPad Pro with a modern M-series chip — that's what we upgraded my wife to when the first M1 iPads came out. While the Face ID has had a few authentication issues, it's not as big of an issue with the iPad as it is with a device you carry around outside in the world. At the same time, the lack of the home button means I'd be stuck with the little white dot, the soft home button that I use on my iPhone 13 Pro — kind of a pain when your watching streaming content. But the worst is probably the lack of a headphone jack. As of today's post, the only iPad in the current line-up that still has a headphone jack is the 9th generation basic iPad.
I know what the corporate line is on this — you can use Airpods or with the older Lightning-based devices, you could use their Apple Lightning connector earbuds. Now it's, "you can use an adapter dongle." But the simple question is, why can't I just use regular headphones, the same ones that I can use to connect to my Macbook Pro. When I'm on the plane, I want to use headphones. I have nice headphones that I use when I'm on the plane. I can use them to connect to in-flight audio on international flights, but I can't connect them to the newest iPad?
With the phones, I've heard some people try to sell the idea that the standard audio jack would make the iPhone less water resistant. Okay, but the iPad isn't used in the same environments and it doesn't need to meet that standard. The iPad Pro was pitched as sort of a laptop replacement — when the laptop has an 3.5mm audio port. It's probably just a matter of another rev or two for them to try and remove the audio port from the Macbook Pro, but seriously, WTF Apple?
I know. It's a pretty simple usage model, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one that operates this way, but suddenly, the theme running through Apple designs is that I'm the idiot, that my usage patterns and my expectations for the technology are wrong. Frankly, if the things that I designed were that misaligned with my audience, I'd be out of work.
Perhaps the funniest aspect of this was when Apple announced their Hi-Resolution Lossless Audio, but it wouldn't work on any of their existing audio components. It didn't work on Airpods, Airpod Pros, or even their Airpod Max headphones — even if you were using a wired connector with the Airpod Max headphones. It's kind of like being saddled with another version of the Touchbar.
So here I sit, with a dying iPad. It seems like my best choice for a replacement is the base model from the previous generation, where I'll get one or two improvements like a faster processor and a battery that can hold a charge, but I'll lose some better speakers and some screen quality. And by making that choice, I'd be choosing a system that may not run next year's OS, or if not next year, a year or two after that. Thanks Apple.
These are the kinds of things that make you wish for the old version of Apple, the one that actually solved design problems rather than working through iterations of designs that progress toward getting rid of that terrible "notch" or trying to find ways to make people use Siri.
As 2023 wraps up, it seems like it might be a fitting time to look at some of the vendors and services that have changed their service in the past year or so and, correspondingly have lost me as a customer. I'm sure that I'm not alone.
HBO / HBO Max / Max — After something like about 10 years of subscribing to the streaming version of HBO, this year's Max updates finally crossed the threshold into sucking so badly that I cancelled my subscription. The original HBO app had it's issues, but it had some of the best movie and TV series content. When you tried to "View All" on the movie list, it would load about a 30 titles, then hang for a minute or more while it loaded the next 30. Sometimes you couldn't get through the entire list without the app hanging. Still, you could count on most of the top box office hits to become available on the service at one time or another. HBO Max was an optimistic improvement, with seemingly better software and some added content like the Looney Tunes cartoon library. While the HBO Max content typically lacked the gravitas of more classic HBO content, it wasn't the garbage dump that it became when it changed to Max. With Max, they backed up the truck and dumped the worst reality TV garbage onto the platform. Add to that a problem that grew out of the pandemic—an erosion of noteworthy box office content—followed by the writers and actors strikes, and the weeks or months of waiting for meaningful new content seemed endless. When I received the notice that they were going to start charging more for the service, it was the last straw.
Public Storage — After eight years or so and using one Public Storage facility to store stuff like holiday decorations and other things that we don't use regularly and don't really have room for at home, Public Storage increased the rent on the space to about double what it was when I first rented the locker. Add to that a break-in at several lockers a few spaces down, and it became clear that the value of their service was becoming a big question mark. After reviewing several options, we were able to find a larger space for more than half the cost of the rent at the old space. This is what happens when pricing algorithms don't understand loyalty.
On their way to the chopping block
Amazon Prime — Recently, I've seen a number of people complaining about the increasing cost of Amazon's Prime subscription service. As online ordering has grown and the number of competitive options have increased, the perceived value of free two day shipping has dropped, and paying $139 per year seems excessive to some. For me, the critical break came when Amazon sent a notice that they'd be incorporating ads into all of their Prime Video streaming content unless you paid an additional $2.99 per month. Frankly, if Prime Video had been a stand-alone service, I probably would have cancelled it years ago. While some of the Prime Video series have been good, the service has always felt like an incomplete offering. Additionally, I've always hated how they mixed content that you needed to pay for with content that was available for free as a Prime member — sort of an annoying bait-and-switch. That tactic is one reason why I have not purchased or rented any content from them.
It's not the only stupid thing that they do. We used to shop more frequently at Whole Foods. While different Whole Foods markets varied, some of the larger ones in the area (Cupertino, Mountain View) had great meat counters, great cheese counters, and a solid produce section. When Amazon took over, the stores evolved into a sort of shell of it's previous form. The meat counters in the large stores were cut down. Practically speaking, the meat counter at the Cupertino Whole Foods is half the size that it used to be, with the other half used to display packaged meats or cooked food. Similarly, while Whole Foods used to be a destination store for produce, now their choices often seem limited and they frequently run out of stuff. But the worst is their stupid transactional system. First, they added the Amazon Prime credit card and offered a discount to Prime members using the card. Then, they started offering some deeper discount specials to Prime members, but only if you used their Prime phone app and scanned a bar code generated by the app. Why couldn't they simply determine that you were a Prime member by the Prime credit card that you were paying with? Even if you showed the cashier, it didn't matter. Only the tracker app mattered for the discount. I'd like to say that that specifically was the reason why we went from frequently shopping at Whole Foods to seldom shopping there, but it wouldn't be true. The real reason is that they simply quit carrying many of the products that we purchase. Or the products that we purchased there became so bad — we once got a skirt steak from there that was so stringy and tough, it was basically inedible. At this point, we'd be unlikely to buy beef from there, even with some steep Prime day discounts added in.
Nob Hill Grocery Store — We've been shopping at Nob Hill for years, in part due to it's proximity to us. Recently, like Whole Foods and Safeway, they added this extra discount if you link your transaction with a phone app. Unfortunately, our first experience with this resulted in three packs of cheese purchased at 3x this price shown back where the product was, despite having an account that links our transactions to a phone number and an account (and that information provided at the transaction). In short, they followed the recipe to make upset and dissatisfied "loyal" customers.
Really Bad Account-Based Marketing Initiatives — 2023 was the year when some businesses decided that they needed to see aggressive growth or aggressive change, or something. Perhaps one of the funniest stories of the year for me revolved around a change in our Salesforce.com Account Team. Back around the time that Dreamforce was scheduled, I was forwarded an email from a VP at Salesforce. The email, inviting them to engage with the VP at Dreamforce, was addressed to two people from the leadership team, a biz-dev guy, two guys who oversee sales for two different product groups, and a guy who had left the company 10 years prior. Of the people on that list, only one was probably an appropriate audience (not the guy who had left the company). When I reached out to clarify their communication issue, they kept insisting on a "State of our Salesforce" call. When I explained that it wasn't a good time — and wouldn't be for perhaps a couple of months — they continued to suggest the call. Then, a couple of months later when we had an issue and I reached out to our rep, his response was basically, "that's a bummer, can we have that State of our Salesforce call now?"
I could probably go on, but it seems like a good spot to call it a wrap.
Perhaps one of the greatest takeaways from the past two years was an experiential one created in early parts of the pandemic. For a period of time, when everything was locked down and only a few ventured out periodically for essential trips, you could drive down most roads and only see a small handful of cars. What might have once been a 45 minute drive, composed mostly of stop and go traffic, became a 10-15 minute drive. Sure, you might have to wait in line for 30 minutes before they let you in to resupply and hope they had some of the essentials that you were looking for, but finally, the madness that makes up the roadways around the Bay Area had quieted. Now, as the traffic continues to build back to it's pre-pandemic levels, it's a reminder of one of negatives to the quality of life in the Bay Area.
A year before the pandemic, I wrote about how high density housing was destroying Silicon Valley. With the pandemic, remote work, and the stories about people moving away from the Bay Area, you might imagine that the over-subscription of space in our neighborhood might have eased, but it's simply not the case. Instead, the governments and the regional developers seem hell bent on building gridlock on a massive scale.
A top view of the planned development at El Paseo De Saratoga
Take, for example, this development that was moved forward by San Jose at the El Paseo De Saratoga location in west San Jose. If you've been a resident of the south bay for any length of time, you probably know it as the shopping center with the REI, or where the REI moved to when it left Cupertino. El Paseo De Saratoga was once a pretty standard regional strip mall. They had some restaurants, some stores, a grocery store, a bank or two, and a movie theater. Sadly, many of the businesses at El Paseo suffered under larger market trends. There was a Staples, a Mimi's Cafe, a Le Boulanger, a Lucky's grocery store. You might wonder if El Paseo had issues, but across the street at Westgate Mall, there was a Walmart grocery that was closed as well.
With the closing of the Lucky grocery store (and this broader statewide move to add huge amounts of high density housing), they decided to do a redesign and transform El Paseo into a high density mixed use development.
As someone who lives in this area, when you first learn about a plan to add housing to strip mall, you assume that it's going to be something like the little project over on San Tomas Aquino — maybe 20 to 30 houses on a chunk of land that used to be a tire store and a couple of auto shops. What you don't expect is that the city of San Jose will approve somebody to develop 11 and 12 story towers on the properties that once housed a single story strip mall.
A rendering of what the proposed 11-story buildings will look like
What's better than a strip mall with a Lucky grocery store? How about if we make it a Whole Foods grocery store, but we add 6 floors of housing on top? And while we're at it, let's cut the amount of available parking to 1/3 of what was there. Not only will the Whole Foods seem busy with all of the people right on top of it, but the people driving around looking for parking will make it seem like it's in even greater demand.
Brilliant.
So here's the thing about this high-density development racket. They claim that they're building these at key points on the various transportation corridors. That way, when they add 1000 new residential locations, they can say "see, it's right next to a Caltrain station, so many of those people will be able to simply take Caltrain to the places that they need to go," as though the majority of the new residents won't own a car or ever find a need to drive.
They can't even make that claim for El Paseo. El Paseo de Saratoga is 3 miles away from the nearest light rail station. It's 8 miles to the nearest Caltrain station. Tucked away in this western corner of San Jose, it's nowhere near the Bart expansion. There also aren't a whole lot of bus stops, nor bus lines that run through the intersections around Saratoga Ave, Prospect and Quito/Lawrence Expressway. In terms of driving, El Paseo is 1.5 miles away from Highway 85 and 2.5 miles from 280. It's not near mass transit, nor does it represent housing next to easy transportation access. What's worse, there are no plans to expand mass transportation in the area or to expand any of the surrounding roadways.
And it gets better. They're also planning to add a Costco on Prospect between Saratoga and Lawrence Expressway.
F'd up traffic? Somebody else's problem.
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Housing Rich, Jobs Poor
When I'm talking about traffic in Silicon Valley, one of the things that I try to explain to people who are new to the area is about the broader traffic flows. In the mornings, most of the traffic in the Bay Area flows from the places where there are houses to the places where there are jobs. Then, in the evenings, the traffic flows from the places where there are jobs to the places where there are homes.
This is why there are huge traffic backups going north from Gilroy, Morgan Hill and South San Jose in the mornings. And it's also why there is tons of traffic going toward Mountain View on 85 in the morning. Lots of jobs in those directions, but, historically, not as much housing (or more expensive housing).
In theory, one of the goals of some of these high-density housing developments has been to provide more housing nearer to the jobs. As much as I hate the traffic and the density created by places like the Santa Clara Square development, it actually expands housing in an area where there are a lot of businesses.
In contrast, the non-residential density around the planned El Paseo development is low (15,420 sf/acre) — ~3x lower than the planned Valco development (47,980 sf/acre), ~2x lower than the Stevens Creek Promenade. Meanwhile, the residential density of the El Paseo plan is extremely high (92 units/acre) compared to some of the other area developments. e.g. Cambrian Park (39 units/acre) and Valco (48 units/acre).
But forget about the specific numbers. Instead, think about what's around these actual projects. The Valco project is just about next door to the Apple headquarters and it's surrounded by Apple buildings. As for the Steven's Creek development, there's a lot of retail, but they've been also adding office buildings around Santana Row and there are some corporate employers like Splunk there. It gets worse when you get down to Cambrian Park. The only substantial corporate employer near there is Xilinx.
Meanwhile, if you hop over to the planned El Paseo development, it appears that San Jose is pinning their hopes on adding a handful of retail jobs. There aren't any large corporate employers in the area. They're not adding a corporate campus. And there won't be any added jobs or corporate businesses, particularly once the roads are inundated with all of the new residential traffic.
In other words, what you'll have is a (and this is a technical measure) shit-ton of new residences, with an equally high number of vehicles, the majority of which will be getting onto the roads to drive somewhere else to work at their jobs.
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This Isn't About Improving San Jose for Residents
I can almost guarantee you that, if you asked any Bay Area resident — or at least one that has been here for a reasonable amount of time — would more traffic improve your quality of life? The near universal answer would be no. And yet, San Jose and the state of California seem hell-bent on stuffing more and more high-density mixed use developments into every corner of the Bay Area.
They say the want to expand the availability of housing and claim the answer is adding 11 stories of apartments in the spot with underused one and two-story strip malls are located. At the same time, if they went three blocks in closer to downtown San Jose — down Hamilton or down Saratoga — there are aging two and three story apartments that could probably benefit from a face-lift. But again, it's not about making things better, it's about trying to turn under-used retail and parking into cash. They don't want to upgrade things, they want to take the easy money and run.
Don't get me wrong. I understand that there would be a lot of challenges with updating and transforming existing multi-resident properties, starting with the fact that there are already existing property owners and existing residents. But these people are residents. They are constituents. And yet, none of these high-density multi-use developments are really about improving the quality of life for the existing area residents.
What Can You Do To Help Stop This Overstuffed El Paseo de Saratoga High-Density Development?
If you're a resident of San Jose, you should be aware that the San Jose City Council has a hearing and a vote scheduled for Tuesday, June 21. This is your opportunity to speak out and voice your opposition to the existing plan.
You could also reach out to the Mayor and the 10 City Council members and voice your opposition to the plan. For more comprehensive information on the entire project, check out this link from the Moreland West Neighborhood Association, Joint Neighborhoods Letter to City Council on El Paseo Project — Share! Write!!.
These days, politics and current events weigh heavily on my thoughts. Perhaps you find yourself feeling similarly. Since I try to avoid writing about political topics on this blog, the nature of current events kind of puts a damper on other topics rising to the level of a blog post. Recently though, there's been an interesting aspect of politics that keeps reminding me of important marketing themes, so I thought I would share some thoughts.
In many ways, political candidates and elections are similar to the product marketplace. Candidates position themselves and their ideas, they try to differentiate themselves from the others on the market, and an election is a kind of purchase decision. Viewed through that lens, you can learn some interesting lessons about politics
One of the great themes of political positioning is this idea that candidates start out with more extreme, polarizing positions -- essentially, strong differentiation in certain areas -- particularly in the primary elections, then "move towards the center" as they move toward a general election. This softening of their positions is, theoretically, designed to expand their audience as they approach a more common denominator.
But there's a fundamental problem with this approach; the epitome of center, the lowest common denominator is boring.
In a somewhat broader framing of this process, the candidate is a supposed to build a broader appeal by not having any elements that might serve as barriers to people liking them -- the, "I don't see anything that I don't like about this candidate, so I'll vote for them" notion.
The reality is that products don't work this way, and I don't think that candidates actually succeed this way either. Nobody chooses a product because they believe that it's mediocre or that it's the least objectionable. Safe, qualified candidates frequently lose to incompetent candidates who can build excitement around themselves, positions they hold, or issues they're trying to advance.
Perhaps the easiest example to reference was the California governor election between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis. While Davis was more experienced in government processes and arguably more competent, Schwarzenegger was able to leverage his celebrity status and generate excitement around the issue of the "car tax", vehicle registration fees.
Exciting products and new ideas are risky. While it can be really easy to find people to tear down or minimize a new approach, it's easy to underestimate the appeal of some of these ideas. For example, consider when New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talked about a 70% tax on income above $10 million. While there was some outrage raised about the idea in the media, when polled, they found that 59% of people supported the idea. What's more, that support spanned many traditionally perceived political demographic borders.
The Problem with "Electability"
Another related political concept is the idea of electability. This concept is often used in an effort to drive this positional shift toward the lowest common denominator. It's also used to skew the true market-nature of some primary elections, pushing voters to try and select the candidate that they think that most other people would be willing to vote for, rather than selecting who they think is the best.
At the core, the problem with this is when people try to make calculations based on what they think that other people think.
Instead of thinking of electability in terms of specific candidates or perceived "reasons why some larger group the electorate might not vote for a specific candidate", it might be better to think about this in product terms. Often, electability is that pre-judgement of a product's marketability, usually wrapped in FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt). It's like the thinking that says that the iPhone will fail because it doesn't have a physical keyboard, that people really want a physical keyboard. It's the kind of thinking that speculates people won't buy iPhones because they don't have user-serviceable batteries. What we know from history is that, when it came to buying iPhones, these factors didn't keep people from buying iPhones.
Similarly, perhaps you remember when people said nobody cared about what color their computer was -- you could pick any color, as long as it was beige. When the iMac came out, suddenly color mattered. Suddenly, the external design of the personal computer mattered. And, for a period of time, color was important. Then, as many computer manufacturers began copying Apple and making color computers, color became less important again. In the context of electability, just because something used to seem important or exciting, it doesn't mean that it's still an influential consideration.
What's more, when you think about those products that tried to leverage 'tired' features to help sell their product, there were probably a few seemingly knowledgeable product marketers who thought the idea was good enough and important enough to have it included in the product. These people knew -- or thought that they knew -- what the market wanted, and they got it wrong. They over-weighted the significance of a feature (or features) and the product failed.
Anyway, that's probably enough on this political topic for a while.
If you're on the road these days, you can't help but notice one inescapable fact -- traffic in the Bay Area just keeps getting worse and worse. Increasingly, we're seeing gridlock on our roads. During rush hour, there are times and places where you have to wait through a green light because you can't make it through the intersection -- there isn't any room for your vehicle on the other side. All of these vehicles and increased traffic density means longer drive times, lost productivity, and increased stresses from time pressures, bad drivers, and road rage.
Commuting home the other day, I took a route that was similar to my commute a couple of years ago and I was shocked by where I experienced traffic back-ups, and by how much traffic there was. My rough estimate, based on where I was seeing the back-ups, is that we may have double the number of cars on the road compared to just two or three years ago.
But where did all of these cars come from? Why are there more cars here?
I have one simple answer -- high-density housing. Over the past five years or so, there has been a trend to transform areas of land that once held one and two-story buildings into high-density residential and multi-use/residential structures. In the photo above (that I happened to take about three years ago), what was once a Santa Clara technology campus with about three 2-story buildings was being transformed into a multi-story, high-density multi-use housing facility. The same transformation is also taking place in a couple of blocks in every direction from here.
The big joke with these places is that they make the claim that these high-density residences won't significantly increase traffic because they're close to the train station and public transit. The reality is that, with most of these places, you need to estimate an additional 1.5 cars on the road.
It's surprising to me that so many of these developments have been approved (and continue to be approved) by local city councils. While there are always calls for more affordable housing (and claims that a lack of housing is the problem), these developments are simply eroding any semblance of quality of life in the area. Here's my latest analogy for the problem:
Imagine the Bay Area like an awesome Internet Cafe, good food, nice environment, good Internet connectivity. Then, people start having meetings there and more people keep coming in. Soon, there is no space to sit, all of the tables are occupied and all of the chairs are full.
Troubled by this, the patrons call for more chairs, more places to sit. Comfy chairs are changed to benches and counters are added to walls, so more people can fit in, but soon there is no place for coffee cups and few places for computers.
But the worst is that, while the number of patrons has grown significantly, the cafe's Internet connection is still running on the same DSL line that provided reasonable broadband 15 years ago. The Internet Cafe has no Internet.
The Bay Area is collapsing under the weight of too many users while the roads, our broadband connectivity.
It would be one thing if we had the infrastructure to support the human density that they are building for, but we don't. We have no subways, no metro train system. And if you look at San Francisco as an example, we're going on 10 years and they still haven't completed the Muni line from Union Square to the Caltrain station.
And just when you thought they couldn't pack any more in, there's more high-density housing on the way...
I just spent the week in San Diego for a conference and it made for an interesting comparison to last year's San Diego event.
In San Diego last year, everywhere you went, there were bicycles -- GPS-enabled bike share had taken over the downtown convention center area. There were probably three or four different companies with bikes all around. What was surprising was that I'd seen a few ride share bikes in the time, but in nowhere near the number that there were there in San Diego. Still, the bikes didn't seem out of place -- between the climate, the beach culture of San Diego and the transportation around the downtown area, the bikes seemed like a great complement to the transportation infrastructure there.
Last year there were only two options for electric scooters, Bird and Lime, and the actual number of scooters you saw was rather limited. While I used the bike share bikes for all of my around-town trips last year, I didn't rent a single scooter. In part, it was because the scooters were kind of hard to find, but some of it had to do with the whole scooter experience itself. For example, if I went for a late night run to the store for water and snacks, the idea of a nighttime ride back to the hotel on a scooter with an imbalanced load of groceries seemed like a good recipe for hitting the pavement. In contrast, most of the bike share bikes have baskets so that you could load a small amount of groceries in them.
This year, I saw only one GPS enabled bike company here, and bikes were few and far between. Instead, there are electric scooters everywhere. Everywhere. I saw scooters from three or four companies, including Lyft (something I hadn't seen before). There are also these little electric things that looks sort of like a mash-up between a bike and a mini-bike -- you sit on a bike seat to ride them, but they have something like 16" tires with bicycle disk brakes. There are no pedals, just foot-pegs. These things seemed to be a bit faster than scooters too.
The wholesale invasion of the electric scooters is kind a mixed bag. When I was getting ready to go to San Diego, I was actually looking forward to getting some bicycle time in, turning the pedals and burning some calories. Instead, there's not much for calorie burn on the electric scooters.
The scooters were okay for making the short trip from the hotel to the convention center faster. If you had your stuff in a backpack, you didn't really notice the load, but I don't know that someone with a briefcase style bag would say the same thing. That being said, the couple of times that I took a scooter out to restaurants in the Little Italy area, it was a ride that bordered on madness. Between the small wheels and the overall condition of the roads, each and every ride had moments when I thought that there was a better than even chance that I was going to crash -- and I would consider myself someone with better skills with my cycling background and decent sense of balance.
When I got off the scooter at the end of a scooter ride between Little Italy and the hotel, not once did I think, "man, that was fun. I can't wait to do that again."
Even more surprising for me were the times when I saw adults taking kids for a ride one of the scooters.
Ultimately, while I understand that the scooter model offers a lower cost element that enables these businesses to scale more easily and that the individual vehicles take up less physical space, I'm not optimistic about any sort of grand scale growth for this transportation alternative. I think it's only a matter of time before something like reports of serious injuries put a damper on the enthusiasm surrounding the whole electric scooter thing. I just wish that they would bring back the bikes.
It's a new year and, following a warning from Apple on earnings, Apple's stock price has dropped significantly. In the warning, Apple blamed China's economy and consumer delays in upgrading their iPhones as key factors. Beyond problems with the economy and the monkey at the wheel flinging tariffs around, Apple's product problems have been a continuing trend, so it's hardly surprise that we're seeing that play out in their sales results. In terms of their product offering, the last time that Apple was this far off the rails, Steve Jobs came in for the turnaround rescue, reshaping not just the company, but the core product line. Something like that happening at this point seems rather unlikely, but rather than staring off into the distance looking for the rescue ship, let's drill down into some of the places where the current boat is taking on water.
In the earnings call, Tim Cook attributed part of Apple's revenue issue to people not upgrading their iPhones as quickly as they did in the past. For many in the media, this is directly related to the high price of the newest iPhones. Apparently, there has even been talk of price cuts across the iPhone line.
While I don't disagree with an assessment that the cost of the device is a big negative on the current line of iPhones, I don't think that that is the only answer. After all, I bought a new iPhone XS; however, in using it, I found the device to be so functionaly frustrating, I switched my phone back to my old iPhone SE. I carry the iPhone XS -- the camera is really good -- but I don't use it as a phone.
With the current state of the iPhone product line and the implied strategic direction, I expect that my next phone will come from eBay, since that's the only place that I can find an iPhone like the iPhone SE.
What's Wrong With Apple's Products
Apple's product mess extends far beyond iPhone X series. Over the holiday break, Macrumors published this post, "What do you want to See From Apple in 2019?" While lower prices topped the comment responses, you'll also see several top ranked comments focused on product. A couple of highlights include:
"Some new leadership, especially over in product." (the second most up-voted comment)
"Back to basic that Design is about how it works, not how it looks."
These comments echo the kinds of things being said within the professional design community where Apple products have been a staple for decades. Cast in a different light, these are things the "Pro" user community is saying.
Consider this Techcrunch post lamenting the loss of the headphone jack from over the break. Normally, I'd expect a "will the next iPhone include Bluetooth 11.7 Superband and theoretical 6G wireless?" from many of the tech blogs, but this post actually includes a look back at the history of the headphone jack on cellular phones. It's actually a nice walkthrough and a reminder of what a significant step it was for Apple to include a standard headphone jack on the iPhone and how that changed the industry. It was an important design decision that, by the time we got to 2016, Apple forgot it.
Why? The Techcrunch piece focuses on the idea of selling proprietary Airpods, but I think that is just another symptom because this disregard for the factors behind some of these design decisions, factors that were solved by Apple, then forgotten and abandoned. Good design understands history. Fashion follows the wind.
While I've written also about my complaints about the removal of the headphone jack, the removal of the MagSafe charging interface is another example of this same kind of disregard for the value and historical significance of the design. Over the years, I've has a number of Apple laptops. From Powerbooks to Macbook Pros, I've used and carried multiple versions over the years. Before MagSafe, all of my Apple laptops suffered from the same problem -- the charging connection became problematic and would only work in certain positions and my laptop became a desktop because I couldn't unplug it risking that I couldn't get it plugged in again. This issue was always caused by the same thing -- periodic accidental yanking of the cord like when the laptop was moved or when you happened to trip over the cord or such.
The MagSafe interface was a godsend. I can't tell you how many times the power cord was ripped from my laptop with the MagSafe connector on -- with no problem. Typically, these instances involved a few strong words, a sense of reassurance, and a return to work. Having spoken to product people in the PC industry, this was one of the most envied, desired features for PC laptops, but Apple's patent mojo was strong. There's a reason why Microsoft included a magnetic charging connection on it's Surface Pro devices.
And what did Apple replace it with? A USB-C charging interface that requires a special class of USB-C cables to charge the device. Gone is the magnetic connector. Gone is the LED that displays whether the device is charging -- another extremely popular, easily overlooked innovation that took multiple years and multiple product iterations to bring to market.
What's worse is that, while the old MagSafe charging port was kind of dumb, using a data-capable USB-C port for charging presents a potential threat vector. Back in September, I came across this article about hackers/security experts crafting a malicious USB cable that could be used to compromise a system in a few seconds. It's probably also worth noting that the USB-C standards body has just recently began to discuss an Authentication Program to protect against malware and firmware/hardware based attacks. So, while I haven't ever had to worry about malware and viruses through my laptop charger before, Apple's new systems have all incorporated this brilliant innovation.
Resistance to Upgrading
One of the factors cited by Apple in their recent earnings call was an observed slowdown in the rate of users upgrading from their existing devices. Some of this is similar to what we saw in the PC industry several years ago. While processor performance provided some percentage of performance improvements, when the base level of the device had reached "good enough" and perceived requirements were not growing at the same rate, people started holding onto their systems longer and longer.
Remember when the idea of "Netbooks" were all the rage? Remember how people were pushing for Apple to offer a Netbook? In a sort of response, Apple introduced the iPad and we all know how well that went. Looking back, we now know that Netbooks didn't really succeed in doing anything other than undercutting most PC hardware manufacturers' average selling price and devaluing their hardware on the whole. Meanwhile, the creeping trend for today's Apple has been increasingly trying to convince people that the iOS-driven iPad Pro is as good as a Macbook and that a lot of core iOS software framework should be used on the Mac.
If you didn't believe them initially, wait until you see how they've added an iPhone like LCD function-bar to your Macbook Pro so that you can watch your laptop battery juice ooze out. Can't believe on revolutionary and innovative it is? Wait until you see us add it to all of our other systems' keyboards (oh wait). Still concerned about how much power it might drain? Try our new "dark mode" in the Mac OS...
Remember when getting the Beatles on iTunes was a big deal? Little did everyone realize that "Helter Skelter" was going to become the soundtrack for Apple's product strategy.
To add insult to injury, you get things like this, Yes, the 2018 MacBook Air's FaceTime HD Camera is Awful. Yes, finally the venerable MacBook Air was upgraded in 2018. Finally it had a Retina display. Sadly, it was also the end of MagSafe and the end of USB-A support on Apple's portable line. Other than that, it seemed like a pretty decent upgrade -- until you started to look into the nooks and crannies and under the rug. Hidden from view, they stuck an Intel Y series processor. Of course, Apple didn't really play this up (and most consumers look at the "i5" or "i7 number), but many of the things that I read were poo-pooing this decision.
I could go on for a while with more examples. Perhaps the simplest thing to say is, many people characterize this reluctance to upgrade being driven by price or a lack of innovation driving enough need/interest in newer hardware (remember when everyone was looking for "the killer app"). I think that there may be a third contributing explanation that is being under-factored into a reluctance to upgrade -- a concern that from a quality and utility perspective, the newer product is going to be worse by many degrees of measure.
While I'm in no position to know whether the story is valid or not, it can be an interesting exercise thinking about why the various respective parties might have an interest in denying the story. Similarly, it's probably worth spending a bit of time thinking about why, if it isn't true, the story was published and what might be behind it.
All of that being said, thematically, concerns about technology back doors being placed into electronic devices -- and the implications of these vectors -- will continue to be an ongoing theme.
Caveat Emptor.
------- Update: ----------
You may find this to be pushing into the "conspiracy" end of the spectrum, but here's an interesting look into some of the nuances of the language of rebuttals from the Emptywheel blog. There's also a good breakout of the story into a timeline with links to some of the stories at the time they emerged (I found the Apple, SuperMicro firmware thread to be particularly interesting.
The one thing that I was hoping for in the Apple iPhone announcement back in early September was an updated iPhone SE. While I'd seen enough on the Apple rumors sites to be concerned that, if the rumored updates to the iPhone SE were true, I'd probably be unhappy with that device. As it was, the rumors sites were talking about a glass-backed iPhone SE with no audio port and no home button -- but I tried to remain optimistic. I'd even considered, in the days prior to the iPhone Xs announcement, purchasing a 128GB iPhone SE just so that I'd have a new one without 2 years of wear and tear on it.
Don't get me wrong, my iPhone SE is still a great phone that still only shows minor scrapes and scratches despite two years of life without a case.
At the same time, you couldn't help but notice the better image quality from her iPhone 8. It didn't help that there were three little spots that I kept seeing in my photos, imperfections that I came to realize was probably the result of damage to the camera lens.
With the iPhone Xs announcement, I'd hoped that Apple would, at least, continue to sell the iPhone SE - dated as it is/was. Seeing it EOLed was probably the worst aspect of that announcement.
So, grudgingly, when orders opened up for the new iPhone Xs back in September, I ordered one. It sounds like a simple decision, a simple action, but it was something more. At the time, I rationalized my decision a couple of ways.
First, I told myself that I'm adept enough with electronics that I could overcome the failures of the design in the iPhone Xs. After all, I thought, how bad could it be? I was sure that, while it might be mildly frustrating at times, I would be able to use the device and would benefit from the new camera. What was surprising was how wrong that prediction turned out to be.
From a size standpoint, I thought the iPhone Xs would end up being about the same size as the iPhone 8. Having used an iPhone 6s Plus for a year, I knew that that phone was just way too big, but I was under the impression that the iPhone X brought something close to a "Plus" size screen into the smaller non-plus sized body. While I knew that it would be larger, I wasn't prepared for how large the iPhone Xs turned out to be.
This week, after almost three weeks of using the iPhone Xs, I switched my phone back to my iPhone SE.
As I used the iPhone Xs, a number of issues because clear. First, while the whole notion of Face ID seemed like an idiotic authentication interface to me, in practice, it proved worse. While I'd initially been impressed with it's ability to recognize me and unlock the device -- almost like it authenticated without effort -- as I used it day-in-and-day-out, I began to notice that it seemed like it failed more often than it succeeded. Running the out-of-the-box software configuration, Face ID fails when you're wearing sunglasses. In other words, when you're using the device outside, you have to stop what you're doing, lift up your sunglasses and force the device to authenticate. It's worth noting that the fingerprint sensor on my iPhone SE worked equally well inside and outside, without regard to whether you were wearing sunglasses.
Face ID also often failed to work if I tried to access my iPhone while it was sitting on my desk in front of me, at a table in a restaurant or a number of other locations that I tried to casually access my iPhone from.
So, imagine yourself at lunch with a colleague and you hear your phone chime indicating that you'd received a text. With iOS 12, the default information displayed on the lock screen is that your received a message from a specified contact. In order to view that on the iPhone Xs, you have to pick up your phone and look at it, something that can be disruptive and be perceived as rude. In contrast, with the fingerprint ID, you can simply touch your iPhone, look down, and you can see whether the text is important or not.
I can't tell you how many times I repeatedly went through scenarios similar to this, particularly since, for many text messages, all you really need to do is determine whether the message is important or not. And worse, because the iPhone Xs locks quickly, you can find yourself having to repeat the whole exercise multiple times in during a single window of receiving multiple texts. It's not just bad, it's terrible.
Additionally, I thought that the lack of a headphone jack might simply be an inconvenience that I would get used to. In practice, I found that this also wasn't true. I should note that, prior to my iPhone Xs, I used my iPhone for all of my telephone communications. It's also worth noting that, while I have Apple Airpods and I use them as a Bluetooth headset when driving or some other activities, when I need to make calls where I want to ensure the audio quality of the call, I use the Apple earbuds that came with the phone. Often, sitting at my desk, I would have my iPhone SE plugged in and charging while using the earbuds for a call.
With the iPhone Xs, initially I brought the lightning based earbuds along, but I soon found myself trying to decide whether to charge the iPhone or to plug in the headset and make a call. Over nearly three weeks of use, I found myself hesitant to make phone calls. Eventually, I put my Lighting earbuds into my backpack and only took them out once or twice. Essentially, whether it was just psychological or practical, I realized that my iPhone Xs was barely functioning as a phone.
Another aspect that anticipated how much of a problem it would be was the lack of a home button. I wish I could tell you how many times I used a "Sweep Up" gesture on the device with no results. It doesn't just fail once or twice, I would estimate the failure rate at greater than 20%. You might argue that the case is a contributing factor, but I don't think that's actually the case. This failure to function has a significant impact on how well the device functions day to day. For example, if you have a problematic app and you want to "double-tap" the home button in order to bring up the multi-task screen and kill the app, you may find yourself trying for 20-30 seconds before getting the interface to change. That's just one example. It happened more frequently than I would have imagined, ane particularly frustrating if you're trying to do something like kill an app.
----
So, after a particularly frustrating round of receiving texts on my iPhone Xs and wrestling with the device functionality just to access them, I decided that I was done with it -- that I was going to switch back to my iPhone SE. I figured that I could simply carry the iPhone Xs around, using it for it's camera functionality and, since it was sometimes convenient to have the larger display, use it as a wifi-based device when I needed the larger display. If I need network access, I could simply use my iPhone SE to create a hotspot for the Xs.
I wish I could share with you the immense sense of joy that I felt once I switched back. Holding the smaller device in my hand brought me an unexpected sense of elation.
At this point, I've been back on my iPhone SE for a couple of days and I'm much happier. The iPhone Xs is sort of like having a pocket-sized iPad. At this point, give me old, obsolete Apple over the new Apple. Whether you want to blame it on Tim Cook, elements in the org further down, or something else, the company is just not doing design and functionality the way that they used to.
This is something that you should read. The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies is a story from Bloomberg Businessweek about SuperMicro server motherboards being hacked by the Chinese military, adding a hardware device to the board enabling access to the server. The hardware device was designed to look like an innocuous component, and the compromised servers may have gone to companies like Apple and Amazon, into their AWS cloud.
So I've written a number of posts on Twitter talking about the recent Apple product announcements and how the company has quit designing phones that match my needs. I was particularly disappointed with the recent announcements when they EOLed the iPhone SE. For the past two years, I've been using a 64GB iPhone SE, the best iPhone I could get when the iPhone 7 came out and Apple abandoned the headphone jack.
For the past two years, I've used the iPhone SE. While the smaller display can be frustrating at times, I think that most of my frustration with the display was that Apple has designed the software for much larger screens. Even while they claim the UI is responsive and can adapt to screen size changes, it turned out that changing that setting in iOS 11 and making the type and interface larger caused significant performance issues on iPhone SE. Apple Support helped me diagnose that back in March of this year.
After two years using my iPhone SE, it's still a great phone, but it's been wrestling with a few small issues. What we noticed the most was the significant difference in the camera performance between the iPhone SE and my wife's iPhone 8. In addition to the photos on the iPhone SE not having anywhere near the clarity of those shot on the iPhone 8, my iPhone SE has picked up a few blemishes on the camera lens that shows up as spots on photos. Normally, I might not care -- at least, I wouldn't care enough to downgrade and loose my headphone jack -- but as noted in a previous post, we have a two-year old son that we like to take lots of picture of. When you have to wait to get someone else's phone to take a picture (or it goes to sleep and you need to re-authenticate), it sucks. This is what drove me into an iPhone Xs purchase.
My new iPhone Xs arrived on Friday, and I've used it over the weekend. As noted in the title, I hate it.
Before I tell you about all of the ways that I hate it, in keeping with one of my college writing classes, I'll start by saying something nice about it. Something I like. The camera. It's great. While it's possible to manipulate your images in Photoshop to match the portrait mode effects, the iPhone Xs captures these kinds images simply and easily. It really works well. The shots are beautiful.
Other things that I've found to be nice about the iPhone Xs -- Face ID works better than I expected. Often, if the iPhone is looking at you, Face ID will unlock the device. That being said, if I'm wearing sunglasses (like when I'm using the iPhone outside at the farmer's market), it won't work unless I lift up my sunglasses. It also doesn't like it when the device is laying on the table, looking up at me. This seems even more problematic when I'm wearing glasses. In short, for all of the times when it knows me, there are many annoying times when it doesn't. In general, my fingerprint worked better (it only failed when my hands were wet or when the sensor got dirty).
Now, let's get to the things about the iPhone Xs that suck.
It's really big. It's been a while since I had the iPhone 6s Plus, but the iPhone Xs feels big like that. And this is the smaller device. Imagine how big the Max must feel. In short, the iPhone Xs has the same problem that I had with the iPhone 6s Plus -- it's too damned big.
For comparison, here are the two versions when I hold them in my hand.
Holding the iPhone SE - front facing
Holding the iPhone Xs - front facing
Holding the iPhone SE - side view
Holding the iPhone Xs - side view
While it may not seem like much of a difference from the images, you can kind of see how much more open my hand is holding the iPhone XS. In real world interaction, this translates into less grip on the phone and, from my previous experience, a greater likelihood of drops. It also makes it extremely difficult to use the device with one hand. In contrast, with my SE, I can spin the device around in my hand without really loosing my grip on it.
You know what's even better than an iPhone that's so big, it's difficult to hold onto? Making the iPhone enclosure almost entirely of glass. Take a look at a couple photos of my iPhone SE.
I've been using this device for two years without a case. As you can see, it has sustained a few drops. What I've highlighted with these two photos are two corners of the iPhone where you can see that the phone took a pretty significant impact. In the top corner photo, it hit the asphalt so hard that it took a big cut out of the metal. Rather than leaving a sharp edge, I used a nail file to smooth the metal, something that required me to sand it down below the surface metal to the red material below.
Would an iPhone XS survive these kinds of impacts? In a case, perhaps, but a bare iPhone Xs? I'd bet not.
I don't think that I'm particularly hard on my devices. I would consider this normal wear and tear. But it does give you a sense of the design priorities driving Apple's iPhones these days.
So, let's move on to more things that suck.
All things charging suck. Pick a topic - wireless charging? I don't have it, haven't imagined I'd need it, nor would I have ever traded my metal enclosure for it -- or the headaches associated with another glass-backed iPhone. There was a reason why the iPhone 5 was a huge improvement over the iPhone 4.
But beyond the glass, why should I have to go out and spend another $50+ for a wireless charging mat when the only thing I can charge with it is this stupid iPhone - particularly when I can just as easily guarantee that the device is being charged when I plug it in.
Then there's the BS "fast charging" feature. Note that this only works IF, you spend another $60 with Apple to buy their more powerful charging brick and another $30 for their USB-C to Lightning cable, neither of which are useful to me or anything other than fast charging the stupid phone.
But don't get me wrong, after I experienced half a day of battery drain on Saturday, I considered fast charging. It's probably worth some analysis and comparison, but if I didn't know any better, I'd almost think that Apple slowed the regular charging speed on the iPhone Xs -- even using the iPad charger, it charges painfully slow and the battery usage seems high.
What else sucks about the iPhone Xs?
No home button really sucks. Yeah, they've figured out a way to make the interface run without a home button, but it doesn't work well. Essentially, sliding up from the bottom edge of the screen is supposed to equal a home button. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. There are times I've had to make 3 or 4 swipes up just to get the interface to do what it's suppose to.
Perhaps the bump created by the bottom edge of the case makes your finger skip, but would you even consider carrying this expensive piece of glass without a case?
The other thing that comes into play with the iPhone Xs is, since there isn't a home button, it wants to wake up whenever you touch the phone or it moves. This leads to lots of false wake-ups. At the same time, whenever it wakes up, it also starts to look for your face -- I suspect that this may contribute to why it seems like the battery drains as fast as it does. Maybe it's just me (or maybe it's the default auto-lock setting on this device), but it also seems like it goes to sleep faster than it did previously. Maybe that's a feature to highlight how well their Face ID works.
It goes without saying that the lack of a headphone jack also sucks. First, there was the "I need to carry two pairs of headphones with me to work today, one for this stupid iPhone Xs, and one for everything else." Then, when I got to work, I plugged my iPhone in to recharge from listening to streaming audio on the way in during the commute. I briefly thought about listening while I recharged the iPhone, something I could have done in the past, but quickly remember that I can't do that on this stupid iPhone.
Bottom line -- yeah, it sucks. It sucks, but the camera is great.
At this point, I've considered switching back to my iPhone SE as my primary phone, disabling the cellular on the iPhone Xs and just using it as a camera. It's a difficult decision, but it seems like the kind of decision that Apple is forcing us to make these days. In the same way, caught between choosing a new Macbook Pro or a refurbished pre-USB-C version late last year, we opted to buy Apple products that were, essentially, three years old. It really says something about the state of Apple, doesn't it.
My wife and I both travel for business. With travel policies being what they are, different companies often have different preferences in terms of airlines and hotels. As a result, she frequently flies American Airlines while I flew United for many years (I stopped flying United after being repeatedly stuck in their crappy base level of service despite having status). As you can imagine, this often raises question marks about what airline to fly on and what hotel to stay at when we travel as a family.
To a certain extent, it's easy to correlate travel loyalty programs to individuals because the airline's business is measured by seats. One butt equals one seat equals one account. Over many years of travel, I never really questioned this idea. At the same time when it comes to travel loyalty programs, over the years, I've primarily been focused on airlines. Hotels and hotel loyalty programs have always been more of an afterthought. One key reason for this is that, while it's not too difficult to use a primary airline for your travel (assuming that they go to most of the locations that you go), your hotel options aren't going to be as clear-cut. For example, if you attend a lot of business conferences, you'll probably find them hosted at different hotel chains. If you travel somewhere like Las Vegas for an event and you stay in a casino hotel, it probably won't be in any of your hotel loyalty programs. And if you're traveling internationally or, at the other end of the spectrum, to rural locations, your hotel options may be limited. So, for me, hotel loyalty programs were always more about hoping the hotel would treat you a little better than a generic guest.
Some Airlines Offer Family Accounts
Last year, I happened to find myself booking a flight on British Airways (you might remember some of my British Airways pricing posts). At that time, I signed up for the British Airways loyalty program. In reading through their account info, I discovered that they let you sign up your entire family and accumulate miles in a pooled account. It turns out that several international airlines offer these kinds of loyalty programs. I also since learned that JetBlue has a family loyalty program, an unusual offering among domestic carriers and yet another reason to like them as an airline.
Recently, while discussing some aspects of our business travel, my wife and I began wondering if the hotels we often stay at offered family loyalty programs.
Here's the thing, when we travel together, we each can benefit from our individual airline mileage accounts. However, when we get to the hotel, only one of us can benefit. Sharing a room means that one of us loses. This year, for example, we've spent six days in Marriott properties, but my wife gets no credit for that time. In that same way, when she travels, there is no incentive for her to book a Marriott property since she won't have been credited for any of the stays that we've had as a family. In fact, you could argue that it's better for her to book stays in another hotel chain such that, when we travel as a family, we have multiple options for status-upgraded stays.
Perhaps the hotel programs look at things from the standpoint of trying to "avoid" giving out benefits to "people who haven't earned it". Perhaps they're looking at it from the perspective of "spouses don't travel for business very much" or "what's the point of incentivizing the wife we already have the business of the husband?" At the same time, if I'm a traveler with hotel chain loyalty status, what's my perception when my spouse stays at your hotel chain and receives a "lesser" experience?
In short, this lack of offering a family loyalty account at the hotel chains is a real customer relations failure on their part. This really seems like something designed in the framework of "the husband travels and works, the wife stays at home." When you break it down in that context, it seems pretty bad.
Recently, I learned about a company that had hired an outside consulting business to work with it's management and employees in an effort to improve communications and the inter-working relationships in the organization. These outside consultant things always remind me of that part of the movie Office Space where they bring in "the Bobs" and the employees are asked about what they do.
For many that go through this, it's hard to escape an unspoken level of silliness and absurdity -- it's like the company trying to apply a topical medicine (like Neosporin) to fix a deeper, more involved sickness, like depression or pneumonia.
But there's another part of this equation that gets hidden, swept over by the decorum of not being to vocal or outspoken in the face of management when they hold the purse strings of your livelihood (or the other aspects of the culture that drove the idea of the consultant group in the first place). In essence, this is brand alignment problem.
Brand Alignment in the Context of Employees
You can find a lot of definitions and explanations of brand alignment with a quick Google search. In essence though, brand alignment is all about being what you say you are. For example, if your message is that your products are high quality goods, but in reality, your products are poorly manufactured and often break, you have a brand alignment problem. It's an inconsistency between message and factual reality.
The most fundamental aspect of this brand alignment equation that you have to understand is, there is no escaping reality, no escaping the truth that lives outside of the message. You can scream and shout, pay for massive advertising, social, viral, guerilla, -- choose your marketing buzzword, it doesn't matter -- if your products are poor quality, the reality of your brand identity will not be "quality products". In short, a key component of brand alignment is about what you do, not what you say.
Another important aspect of brand alignment is the idea that employees are essential to expressing the company's brand, that in their interaction with customers and the rest of the world, employees are the ambassadors and evangelists for your brand. In that respect, you'll find a number of brand alignment posts that talk about how important it is for companies to provide brand training to their employees.
But here's the thing about training. You can teach employees your company's brand message, but if the relationship with the business isn't aligned to that message, the words are hollow. To quote three questions from this Ignyte Brands post on brand alignment:
Do my employees feel appreciated? Are they invested in the success of the brand? And, most importantly, do they feel like an integral part of the brand story?
This essential element of brand alignment may be one of the most underappreciated, misunderstood aspects of branding and brand identity. Not just that, but it probably provides some key insight into whether a business is performing at it's full potential. Consider, apathetic employees may "meet expectations" and execute their duties within the framework of the required tasks, but uninspiring environments are not going to motivate them to go above and beyond. And, if the business' relationship with employees is simply "competitive salary, competitive benefits", don't kid yourself into thinking that this is operating as an effective motivation engine for brand enthusiasm.
The underlying framework of "competitive salary, competitive benefits" is an HR organization that has basically done their version of competitive research and distilled it down to a set of features that they can match without much risk. That's not product design. If I tell you that making a "Me Too" physical product won't win you any business, most people understand that. But when you put that framework around HR, compensation, hiring and retention, suddenly you'll find a lot of people claiming that business doesn't work that way.
In some respects, you can blame HR and the people that run that department for this. Human Resources is not marketing, and they're not used to looking at things through that lens. I can't tell you how many times I've had to work with HR people and, in discussing even something as straightforward as writing descriptive promotional text about the company, found them unable to to produce something more than a copy/paste version of some other company description they found. They're unable to differentiate the company or even put together a basic framework of a story about what makes the opportunity interesting and why you'd want to work there. If your HR person can't sell your company to prospective candidates, how can you expect to have success in hiring and retention?
You've Got A Lot of Nerve To Say You Are My Friend... Human Resources is Not Your Friend
If you search this term, not only will you find numerous articles written on various aspects of this, you'll also find horror stories of people who sought help from their HR department, only to discover that the HR group was either no help, or worse.
If human resources can't position the company, if they can't produce a compelling framework for why you'll want to work there and if, in the day-to-day work environment, they are not your friend -- how can you expect them to contribute to building a culture of evangelists in your company? Cute newsletters? Internal events? Imagine trying to sell prospective hires on the unique excitement they'll experience because your company also has a summer picnic. Or hosts a pizza lunch for everyone, occasionally. Rah rah rah!
Can you see start to see the framework of issues that are potentially eroding employee enthusiasm for a company -- the elements that are contributing that brand alignment problem?
Another tool that's sometimes referenced in marketing is the Net Promoter Score. For the HR people that might be reading this, here's a link that helps explain Net Promoter Score and how it's calculated. To summarize, rating your feelings about a company on a scale from 0-10, how does the company stack up? Within that calculation, it's important to understand that 0-6 are "detractors", 7-8 are "passives" and 9-10 are "promoters". If the best you can muster from your employees is, what might seem like an average 5 or 6, those people are actually detractors. How's that "competitive salary, competitive benefits" doing for you now?
One thing that I've often heard from HR departments here in the valley is that, "we'll we can't compete with Google. We can't have our own cafeteria, laundry, etc." But the problem is, they're looking specifically at these benefits like features you might offer -- or try to match -- instead of looking at the their constituent base and identifying what would be useful and compelling for them. This is why some of the culture and compensation documents that have come out of Netflix are so interesting.
But even with individual benefits and compensation, you've created a communication framework with your employees. For example, while I've worked with organizations that negotiate a basic package of health insurance coverage and pass some percentage of those costs onto the employee. I've also worked with companies that covered 100% of health insurance costs because, as they said, these are our employees and we want to take care of them. Which message resonates better with staff? Which is more likely to be something that people might evangelize about?
What Message does your Salary and Compensation Package Communicate?
Although salary and compensation are not typically viewed in a messaging context, compensation represents a direct message of employee value by the company to the employee. That being said, many businesses expect that, by implementing a "competitive" salary framework, they have matched a feature and taken that off the table. But what about companies with salaries on the low side? Here's a quick hint, when you're interview process delivers "final stage" candidates and you're making offers -- if some percentage of them choose not to accept, you probably have a compensation problem. Going through a series of interviews is not an uninvolved process on the part of your hiring candidate, so (put in a sales and marketing context), having people drop out of the pipeline at that point should raise a flag. What's more, it should also raise flags about the people who accept -- do they feel under-compensated, but didn't negotiate well or signed on with some sense of desperation?
All that being said, you'll find studies about compensation and salary that offer a few caveats. First, while some people are particularly focused on salary, not everyone is. Additionally, I've seen another salary study that basically said, if people are paid enough, they don't really worry about salary. Rather, the key driver for them tends to be about meaningful work. In that way, I think the key thing to take away with respect to salary is that, while there is no magic bullet for communicating positively through salary and compensation, there are many potential negative messages and wrong turns that a business can make.
How Do You Make Employees Promoters?
First, consider the start-up. Start-ups jobs often include company equity -- stock options. In that way, most people working for start-ups are, in essence, partial owners of the company. Often, they will accept a lower salary number with the hope that their efforts will vest in a longer term, larger pay-off. To accept that position, they must buy into the idea of the company, into the potential for it's success.
Another aspect of the start-up that may be even more significant in terms of aligning employees with the company and the brand is the framework by which corporate goals are defined. For start-ups, goals are often simple, tangible, and with a clear purpose. For example, during one business review meeting at one start-up I worked at, they told us, "right now, if everything holds steady, we have enough money to keep operating through to the end of the year." Beyond the long term goal of trying to make the company successful, this set a simple framework -- find customers, grow the business, or we're out of runway.
Contrast this with the goals defined by established businesses like, "last year our business made $200 million, this year we need to make $250 million." There's no why. For the average employee, there's no clearly defined requirement to do anything different than the previous year, no driver to act. Imagine the employee that made an extra effort to help the company hit the $200 million goal -- does $250 provide any meaningful framework for matching or exceeding the efforts that they just made?
For public companies, stock purchase programs and option awards can help provide employees a sense of ownership in the company. This can help mitigate some of the emptiness of arbitrary corporate financial goals. In it's simplest sense, owning stock in the company means that, if the company is worth more, your portfolio is worth more. You own a piece of that and your efforts are an investment in making it worth more.
In this aspect, there's a correlation between the size of the company and the ease of aligning employees with organizational messages. Smaller is easier. It's a lot easier to connect and align employees with corporate goals in smaller organizations. As organizations grow, people become more removed, more alienated, more disconnected from the influence, impact, and reward loop.
It should go without saying that simply adding start-up aspects to an established company isn't a solution. A great example of this is how many established companies these days undertake initiatives to eliminate offices or cube walls. I once worked in for a business that offered stock options and entertained questions of when they were thinking about an IPO -- this was post dot.com bust. Having gone through an IPO with an earlier company, I knew that this company would never go public, but that didn't stop their management from using the whole stock-option framework to grift employees -- they even sold options to outgoing employees. If you're running a grift on employees, you're probably going to have some brand alignment problems. That being said, the employees that didn't have enough understanding to be skeptical, they were certainly excited by the "stock options".
Ultimately, the way to meaningfully connect with employees and make them Promoters is not to simply copy-paste cultural aspects and incentives onto an environment and expect people to perform. Rather, it's something that requires design thinking, something that understands the unique challenges that your business faces and building an environment that's conducive to making business operations easier and better. It's about understanding what the business machine, your business, is trying to do and optimizing everything for that. It's also about making that machine inclusive. Rather than treating employees as cogs or dumb components, think of them as smart components with sensors and intelligence. Or better yet, think of them as people, people who, if they believe in a goal, will make an extra effort to help achieve that goal.
That makes the framework pretty simple. You need to define believable, meaningful goals, and you need to build an environment where people believe you're taking their interests into consideration.
If you've seen any Salesforce company presentation over the years, you'll most certainly have seen them promote their corporate culture of philanthropy, community and equality. Not only do they frequently promote aspects of these values at Salesforce events (from their work with non-profits to their community service efforts), CEO Marc Benioff got a lot of visibility in recent years directing the company's stance on gender equality and gay rights in a fight against some repressive state laws. But now Salesforce's idealistic brand identity is coming into conflict over it's relationship with US Customs and Border Protection.
