Steve Jobs’s Disastrous iPhone 4 Press Conference
I watched with growing dismay and disbelief as Steve Jobs struggled through his press conference last week about the iPhone 4 dropped calls. Jobs has a rightly earned reputation as a remarkable communicator; indeed there has been at least one book written about his presentation style as something worthy of emulation. But his usual elegant combination of enthusiasm and sang-froid deserted him at Friday’s press conference. Jobs was defensive, angry, and ultimately ineffective. It’s a classic example of how not to conduct public relations.
Jobs usually comes out beaming and full of enthusiasm for a new product or update. His body language reflects that enthusiasm; he’s open, gestures comfortably with his hands, and makes a good connection with his audience.
Today, he was deep in his own personal maelstrom of defensiveness and hostility. His head was frequently down; in fact his whole posture betrayed his unhappiness. He frequently hid his hands behind his back — a classic defensive posture — when he wasn’t clasping them in front of his stomach (another defensive posture).
He began by showing a long demo whose sole purpose seemed to be to demonstrate that other smart phones drop calls too. This is akin to defending yourself by saying, “Yeah, well, Jimmy stole cookies from the cookie jar, too!” In other words, it’s no defense at all, and it looks nasty, dragging everyone else into the mire with you.
Saying, “We’re not perfect; smart phones aren’t perfect,” repeatedly, Jobs added a kind of surly repetitiveness to his defensiveness.
Then he got into the data, which in fact shows that not many people are complaining about the iPhone 4, and it’s not dropping many more calls than the 3GS. But his tone was angry and defensive, so his argument sounded petulant rather than contrite.
When a company wants to put out a PR fire, the only way to do it is to humbly acknowledge whatever mistakes happened and offer to do something concrete about it to see that it stops or it won’t happen again. Jobs’ attitude throughout was, as he said about 10 minutes in, that the whole thing was “blown out of proportion.” That won’t win back the customers whose calls were dropped, and it won’t satisfy the press.
Transparency is the key for all PR blunders, but transparency without attitude. Unfortunately, Jobs had attitude oozing from every pore. So much so that when he said, “We care about every user,” he sounded like he didn’t mean it. Putting his hands behind his back at that precise moment didn’t help either.
So pervasive was his anger that it colored the best moment in the news conference, when he announced that every iPhone 4 user was going to get a free case to solve the antenna-dropped calls problem. That should have initiated the beginning of the end of the PR fiasco, because it was the right thing to do: take action to repair the damage in a way that brings some benefit to the customer. But the way Jobs handled it sounded grudging. He said that Consumer Reports suggested Apple should “just give everyone a free case – so we are.” His tone was close to a snarl.
Jobs ended on stronger ground, talking about his — and Apple’s — passion for delighting their customers. Here he was on a happier plane, and he managed to sound more convincing, if still a little grumpy.
Jobs is Apple’s spokesperson, and he usually does a terrific job. But in this case, his anger and his defensiveness got the better of him. Apple is now a dominant player in the consumer technology market and it can’t afford this kind of ham-fisted performance. Jobs should remove himself from the lineup and let someone else take over. Or he should get over himself and cheer up. But Friday’s press conference was not good corporate PR.
Nick Morgan is President of Public Words Inc, a communications consulting firm, and author of Trust Me: Four Steps to Authenticity and Charisma.
Steve Jobs’s Disastrous iPhone 4 Press Conference
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