Opinion: How Apple always wins by being a smart copycat

Photo credit: Wikiwifi.

Apple never releases a product into the market before its competitors. If you didn’t know any better, you would think this was a deliberate strategy. And you’d be correct because it is. And it’s not a new one. It’s borrowed from industrial designer Raymond Loewy and based on the understanding that consumers are always looking for familiarity in any new product or service. Consumers do not like “optimal newness” and, in some cases, are downright scared of technological advancements that make them feel dumb, stupid, or disfluent. So, Apple releases products into a market after everyone else has. Every time.

The grand release of most Apple products always follows the innovation that some other company has tested on the “jury of customers.”

• We all know that the iPod was not the first MP3 player. It had the 10x advantage of iTunes inside, but it benefited from the fact that other companies had familiarized us with the concept of portable electronic devices that played music.
• Bill Gates actually released the first tablet, Touch, 10 solid years before the iPad. But Apple, with the ecosystem and brand promise we’d come to expect, released the iPad, and we all felt we’d never seen anything like it before. But we had. We’d been conditioned 10 years earlier to believe in the possibility of a handheld touchscreen-only computer.

The same was true for the Apple Watch and will be true for the soon-to-be-released Apple Homepod, which will be the fifth or sixth voice-controlled home device in the market.

So, how does Apple enter a market late, by our standards, and still captures a good chunk of the market? It’s based on the philosophy of MAYA or “Most Advanced Yet Acceptable,” a philosophy put forward by Loewy.

MAYA and Loewy

Based on what is now known as the “mere exposure effect,” Loewy developed a grand theory of product design suggesting that consumers gain comfort from new products that have elements the consumer is already familiar with. He called this theory MAYA. Loewy realized that even in our need to experience new and original things, we want those things to be derivatives of things we already know. He believed that, according to Derek Thompson in his book Hitmakers, “all consumers are affected by the conflicting forces of neophilia (a curiosity about new things) and neophobia (a fear of anything too new).”

Based on this understanding, Loewy went on to successfully design products as broad-ranging as tractors, locomotives, toasters, automobiles, Greyhound buses, Pepsodent toothpaste, ocean liners, and he even had a hand in the design of the Saturn-Apollo NASA space project. Loewy affected the American consumer more than most in his time. And he did this not by creating totally new products but by making the familiar surprising. Sounds a lot like Apple’s approach doesn’t it?

Why Apple will never go first

While Apple benefits from creating hit products that are familiar but surprising, there are two conditions that need to be met before a company can adopt the MAYA strategy:

It is not a winner-takes-all market

Even though the power law still applies, where the #1 company in a market captures most of the returns, the MAYA strategy works better in markets where many winners can exist. The power law does not necessarily mean you have to enter the market first, you just have to enter the market best.

You must get in quickly with a far superior product

Apple’s DNA isn’t just in design, it is also in anthropology. The understanding of what the customers truly desire beyond the basic need the product serves enables Apple to enter the market after other competitors.

Most of the initial products in a market only serve the first and most basic need. To enter the market second and win, you must ladder up to the emotional needs that the customers have and quickly. The beauty of going into a non-winner-takes-all market quickly after a competitor is that you can still charge the premiums that the market of early adopters can bear. You can stick with this premium price by making your brand promise. So when your competitors start the race to the bottom, your technology product stays above the fray, maintaining a healthy margin even as the cost of the underlying components (e.g. sensors and mapping on phones) continues to drop.

MAYA anyone?