Apple Bomb: Competitors are Scrambling

This is how companies should tell a story.

This is how you boldly tell a story to create clear and compelling differences in the marketplace.

This is how you use storytelling to create buzz, conversations, and debate about your company, competitors, and industry issues from a position of strength.

Apple CEO Tim Cook, honored at a recent “Champions of Freedom” event in Washington, took a theme Apple has nipped at for some time — customer privacy — and painted a stark contrast between Apple’s philosophy and that of its competitors/frienemies, mainly Facebook and Google.

Cook put down a firm line of demarcation:

“Like many of you, we at Apple reject the idea that our customers should have to make tradeoffs between privacy and security,” Cook opened. “We can, and we must provide both in equal measure. We believe that people have a fundamental right to privacy. The American people demand it, the constitution demands it, morality demands it.”

[…]

“I’m speaking to you from Silicon Valley, where some of the most prominent and successful companies have built their businesses by lulling their customers into complacency about their personal information,” said Cook. “They’re gobbling up everything they can learn about you and trying to monetize it. We think that’s wrong. And it’s not the kind of company that Apple wants to be.”

You can disagree with Cook. But his story does many things right.

The customer is the protagonist

Cook uses his story to position Apple, but the customer is still the main character. This is a story about a customer and her data, and what companies choose to do (or not do) with that data. It is a story about a customer choosing the tradeoffs she is willing to accept between price, convenience, and privacy.

Apple has a position in the story. Cook paints competitors into another position. But the story is weaved around the customer.

The points of differentiation are stark and simple

Cook says Apple protects customer data while other companies leverage it, sift through it, and use it to make money via advertising. He goes so far as to say Apple believes this is wrong.

You can roll your eyes at Apple grabbing the high moral ground. But the differences are clear and will drive debate about the topic in just the way Apple would like.

The story forces competitors to react and change their stories

Cook’s story comes on the heels of Google’s annual I/O Conference, the company’s annual developer’s conference. Google uses the conference keynote to highlight new and upcoming products, including a well-regarded Photos app, which stores and organizes a customer’s photos from their smartphone.

Google was already in a difficult storytelling position, saying it no plans to otherwise monetize users’ photo data … for now.

Flimsy.

It’s hard to message from a defensive position, even with a great product.

But the question remains: how much do customers care about privacy?

I use Facebook. I use Google services, like Gmail, Docs, even the new Photos app. They work great. They make my life easier. They make me more productive … sometimes. Sometimes they send me down lengthy rabbit holes. But that’s not the point.

I understand the tradeoffs. They are worth it to me. At least they are today.

I don’t know how other customers will feel. Will people feel increasingly threatened by these free services? Apple thinks they will.

Or will feel empowered by what the free services can do for them? If enough people feel empowered, value productivity and fun over privacy, then Apple’s position may fall flat.

But for now, companies like Google and Facebook are forced to alter their stories, to go on the defensive, to talk about privacy from a place of weakness.

And that’s just the way Apple wants it.