Small i.

A recent purchase of an Apple shuffle gave me a good insight into what Apple does well, besides cool technology.

My first impression as I walk into the Apple istore is always, why are these people doing their emails on the laptops spread across half a dozen tables? Surely everyone has a PC nowadays or certainly access to a local internet café. Still they come to play on the machines. Smart really, if all this random use doesn’t break them, then they pass another test.

So I float up the funky plastic staircase to another row of tables lined with more technology than NASA would have required, putting a man on the moon. It’s funky, it’s nerdy, it’s engrossing, engaging and most of all it’s cool, because Steve Jobs says so. Who wouldn’t believe a man who has changed our technology habits and behaviours so dramatically?

So here it gets interesting, as I decide to make a purchase. I catch the i (get it) of the nearest iperson who hang around in iposses or igangs. These ipeople are proud to be nerds (nirds) because they have the power. They speak magical language and carry Star Trek hand phazers that do everything an old cash register used to and more.

My iperson rushes off to get my shuffle while I wait amongst the worshippers of cool. A quick flick of my credit card and I’m ready to walk out with my purchase but not before he types in my email details to send me a receipt online, because he can and I asked for it, because that’s really cool technology. Why wouldn’t you want to work here with all that power at your fingertips?

The price of Apple products has a parity across many resellers so I could just as easily buy my shuffle down the road at the local Harvey Norman but it’s so much cooler and more fun to buy it direct from the istore and chat with the ipeople. Almost sounds cultish.

Yet the fact remains they have hit on a winning service mentality across their staff, who no doubt brag at dinner parties about where they work.

Looks easy enough and technology is certainly not the exclusive property of Apple, so why aren’t more companies playing in that great service, I want to walk into that store and talk with the staff field?

Couldn’t you be that itravel person? Couldn’t you make the experience of buying travel so easy and so cool that you become the itravelshop? What’s it going to take? You have the technology to make it easy and you can certainly use hundreds of new applications to bring an element of cool into the equation.

You just need to become isavvy and use your itelligence and ixperience (it just goes on and on). The more interesting and engaging you make your services, the more likely you are to attract that next generation of travelers.

I typed this on my iPhone, cool huh?