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The strategy conversation you can only have here

What Apple and Vida e Caffè have in common

2010-02-16
If you were to start a business tomorrow how would you approach
your strategy? Would you follow the traditional analytical approach? Analyzing
environments? Analyze customers' needs and competitors to see what they are
doing?

This all seems to make sense and it misses a key component. Good taste.

The strategy that satisfies potential customers, finds a niche with the
competitors and will work in the current environment is often so watered down
and lowest common denominator by the time it gets out the door that it goes
nowhere.

Asked about choosing strategy, Apple's CEO Steve Jobs says*, "We do no market
research. We don't hire consultants. The only consultants I've ever hired in
my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway's retail strategy so I would not
make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail
stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great
products.

"When we created the iTunes Music Store, we did that because we thought it
would be great to be able to buy music electronically, not because we had
plans to redefine the music industry."

This struck me as very similar to the conversation I had with Rui Esteves who
along with Brad Armitage founded the very successful Vida e Caffè coffee chain
in South Africa. "We wanted to build a place that we would like to visit
to have coffee", he said, "Good quality coffee and food in a special
environment."

They did no research, no environmental analysis and no picture of the
competitive landscape. They built something using their best taste and worked
hard.

Both Vida e Caffè and Apple stand as beacons of success proving that there is
at least one alternative to following the text book approach when strategizing
a new business.

The lesson, follow your own sense of taste about what would make an incredible
product.

When I spoke with Rui, we were sitting in his new venture
, a beer salon which is the
retail face of of he and Brad's new business Cervejas São
Gabriel
. The design of the beers and the
salon? "Made of the type of healthy things we think are important," says Rui.

Switching back to Apple, I've included a video where Steve Jobs walks us
through the first Apple Store

before it opened showing what he thinks is important in a retail computer
store. How many companies the size of Apple have a CEO who dictates as much of
their own taste into their products (and in this case store)?

So the thing that Apple and Vida e Caffè have in common, is the founders good
taste, which I happen to agree is, well, good taste.

What other examples do you have of companies with good taste?