Steve Jobs on credit unions 7: They’ll get used to it

Conferences, list serves, seminars, webinars, white papers… there’s no shortage of information to digest when it comes to finding ideas to help grow and differentiate your credit union. While nothing is more important than looking for fresh ideas to foster growth, there’s one problem with this. Too often the only conferences and webinars we put on our schedule are focused solely on the credit union industry.

Over time, we see one great idea recycled over and over again with a nip here and a tuck there to attempt to personalize the brand. Maybe it’s time to take a page out of Steve Job’s playbook when it comes to dreaming up fresh ideas. Throw out the standard playbook and write your own rules.

Take the novel idea of putting the keyboard on the screen of the iPhone. At the time, Blackberry owned the mobile phone market. Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist and close friend of Steve Jobs, relates his introduction to the iPhone. “In the fall of 2006, my wife, Laura, and I went out to dinner with Steve and his wife, Laurene. Sitting outside of the restaurant on California Avenue in Palo Alto, as we were waiting for a table to open up on the balmy Silicon Valley evening, Steve pulled his personal prototype iPhone out of his jeans pocket and said, ‘Here, let me show you something.’  He took me on a tour through all of the features and capabilities of the new device.”

After an appropriate amount of oohing and aahing, Marc recalled finding the only appropriate comment he could think of. A BlackBerry aficionado, I said, “’Boy, Steve, don’t you think it’s going to be a problem not having a physical keyboard? Are people really going to be okay typing directly on the screen?’ He looked me right in the eye with the typical Steve Jobs piercing gaze and said, ‘They’ll get used to it.’”

You know the rest of the story. Since its introduction, Apple has sold more than 250 million iPhones and it’s one of the top-selling smartphones in the world. Blackberry now holds less than 5% of the mobile phone market.

Writing your own rules isn’t a call for you to be a renegade merely for the sake of stirring the pot. Jobs took calculated risks and wrote his own rules for the sake of an improved customer experience.

“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” – Steve Jobs

Show your members what they want and prepare for the growth that comes with it.