50 Years In Tech. Part 8: Almost Illicit Fun

by Jean-Louis Gassée

Clear positioning, a strong team and, above all, a PR genius on our side helped Apple France become Apple’s largest business outside the US.

In Part 6, I recounted how we built a service company to the Apple Retailer trade; in Part 7, how we reached actual customers by lobbing a simple, resonant message over the heads of retailers. In this, advertising didn’t work out as the preferred medium: the few ads produced by our advertising partners weren’t bad, they just failed to communicate the kind of life-enhancing identity we wanted to present.

One of these partners was Jacques Séguéla, the advertising magician noted for launching Citroën cars from the the deck of an aircraft carrier and for contributing to François Mitterrand’s victorious presidential campaign. Séguéla graciously repaid our tepid reaction with a signal favor: he put us in touch with PR guru Lionel Chouchan, the creator of several movie festivals, known for his impeccable integrity (yes!), creative mind and densely rhizomatic address book. Lionel’s most notable creation for us was La Fondation Apple pour le Cinéma. When he began outlining the project, I told him we couldn’t possibly afford the cost of such an operation. In fact, he told me, he knew of a need we could inexpensively fulfill: helping young and always cash-strapped movie directors promote their movies. For 30,000 francs (say $20K today) the Foundation could pay for posters on downtown columns advertising movies and theater shows. He’d assemble an unpaid jury of actors and scriptwriters friends, take everyone to Martinique, expenses paid, for a few days of relaxation and movie reviewing, and of naming a winner to be drummed up. Besides the prize, it cost very little as Lionel leveraged his old festival connections with airlines and hotels.
I felt like a peasant invited to a chic soirée, but it worked. Jim Jarmusch won for Stranger Than Paradise and the publicity we got was vastly out of proportion with the operation’s total cost of approximately $50K. Even when it wasn’t positive at first, the publicity worked for the kind of positioning we wanted. I recall how, at the Cannes Film Festival, a French radio reporter put a microphone in my face and demanded to know what a computer company had to do with the movie business. This was a golden opportunity to explain how Apple was different, how we stood for tools for creative pursuits, as opposed to instruments of oppression mechanizing office tasks. The gent chuckled, everyone understood what/whom I meant.

These were challenging times for Apple. Since 1981, the IBM PC and its cohort of clones were beating up Apple in Corporate America in office productivity applications with fast machines equipped with hard disks and application software such as the popular Lotus 1–2–3. While, in the US, Apple marketeers were struggling to promote the company as a worthy opponent to Big Blue and its clones, at Apple France, we decided a frontal attack was the road to perdition. Early in our existence, we had decided to position Apple as providing tools for creative pursuits, only occasionally getting our machines in the forbidden office fortress through the side door, as memorably depicted by Rick Erickson’s poster:

(Big Business. Two approaches: Theirs, Ours.)

I need to add this worked in a French culture that didn’t particularly like IBM, and where Apple’s California Chic, helped by Steve Jobs’ already mythicized charisma, made us the People’s Liberation Army From Computing Oppression.

Lionel Chouchan had more ideas. As but one example, we didn’t run a conventional press conference for the Mac launch. Instead, drawing again on his media contacts, we put a mock TV evening on a Paris theater stage, complete with personalities videos, demos, yours truly being roasted, and musical numbers by Gérard Lenorman and Michel Sardou, well-known (in France) singers. Together, the medium and the message worked well; to the French mediasphere, they successfully reinforced our creative maverick identity.

The excitement got to us, in a good way.

One day, I overheard a loud telephone argument between a service tech and one of our customers. A logic board had been damaged as a result of a forceful (mallet traces on the edge) backward insertion of an interface card. The customer didn’t like being told he or, more likely, his offspring had abused the hardware. The pin, whose function was to prevent such bad insertion, was deemed too weak and legal action was threatened. The next step was easy to see: I inserted myself in the heated exchange and asked the unhappy customer if he wanted us to buy his system back because “we couldn’t afford a single unhappy Apple patron…”. The answer was a resounding NO, he wanted to keep his Apple ][. Next, I arranged for the customer to bring the dead system to our service department. As a special favor, we’d recycle a board from an otherwise dead machine and bring his machine back to life. Lastly, I asked for his child’s age. Why? For the t-shirt, of course (Apple t-shirts were items then); I want to thank you for the opportunity to make things right.

From then on, we made giving t-shirts to complainants an unofficial practice.

Behaviorists would argue we were naively encouraging questionable behavior and were exposing ourselves to a deluge of ill-founded complaints. No. There are only very few really dishonest customers and one can often see them coming. It’s better to have a reputation for being nice, if occasionally naive, than for being a martinet. Also, think of the word of mouth the “righted” customer will proudly spread.

One last thing.

As business grew nicely, phone traffic became a problem with callers complaining about long waits — five minutes, ten minutes… As it happened we had asked a radio personality, Kriss Graffiti, to record the translation of cassettes supplied with the original Mac, intended to familiarize customers with the strange new machine. She went over the budget she had quoted, expecting to have to eat the extra recording studio expense incurred, and was surprised when, against her tight-fisted milieu’s habits, we didn’t argue and settled without ado.
A pleasant conversation ensued where I mentioned our telephone wait time problem. Because she had (I use the past because tobacco-related cancer killed her) an extremely seductive, clear radio voice, my dream was to have her read stories to callers as they waited. She immediately accepted, told me she’d do it for free as a thank you, and that she’d write the stories herself. These were sweet little tales that markedly changed the mood of callers. Some even asked to be put back on hold because they wanted to hear the end of the tale…

These were fun times and our numbers contributed to the mood. We became Apple’s largest business outside the US. When on a European tour US execs liked to end it with us because we’d lift their spirits.

Unfortunately, the much-awaited and much delayed Macintosh quickly got in trouble, especially in the US. Mac trouble, as we’ll discuss in a future Monday Note, was to become my opportunity, and an occasion to make a series of cultural mistakes when landing in Cupertino in the Spring of 1985…

— JLG@mondaynote.com