Page 163 - The Apple Experience

features. Technically speaking, Siri is an intelligent software assistant and
knowledge navigator application in iOS 5 that uses a natural language user

interface to answer questions. The previous sentence is accurate, but far too

technical to inspire must customers. It doesn’t answer the question, “Why

should I care?” Instead, Apple marketing material described Siri as, “The

intelligent assistant you can ask to make calls, send texts, set reminders, and

more.” Now that’s easy to understand, memorable, and compelling. It sells

the benefit.

Why Should I Care?

When I studied journalism at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism,

the first concept we were taught in Journalism 101 was to answer the
question, “Why should your readers care?” The same technique applies to the

conversation you have about your company, product, service, or cause.

Nobody cares about the product as much as they care about what the product

will do for them.

Apple Store employees are trained to sell the benefit behind Apple’s

products, just as Steve Jobs did so brilliantly in his presentations. Jobs always

answered the question, “Why should you care?” I now encourage my clients

to have a clear and concise answer to that question and to train their sales

staff to have the same answer as well. I recall working with the CEO of a
medical device manufacturer to create the message behind his company’s

revolutionary new CT scan machine.

“Can you tell me about the new machine?” I asked.

“It’s the world’s first dynamic volume CT scan that utilizes 320 ultra-

high resolution rows to image an entire organ in a single gantry rotation,” the

CEO said proudly.