The Problem Behind the Request

Published 13 July 2026

My daughters are keen Apple consumers, and have been for years. I’m not. I don’t own an iPhone and I don’t feel particularly tempted to change from my Samsung device. However, Apple’s rise to technology of choice for many people offers insights for all businesses.

I mention my daughters because, although it seems they are glued to their iPhones, they rarely talk about the technology (other than to tell me to ditch my current phone). They simply expect them to work in every aspect of their lives: messages, shopping, fitness tracking, payments, photos and the rest.

They’re not really buying a phone. They’re buying an experience.

And that leads me to a huge misconception in business. Namely that customers will always tell you what they want.

In the last blog, we saw how Coca-Cola learned that listening and understanding customers were, importantly, two different things. (Read more here).

Apple presents almost the opposite lesson.

It wasn’t successful because it gave customers exactly what they asked for. It was successful because it understood the frustrations behind what they were asking.

When the first iPhone launched in 2007, mobile phones weren’t new. Companies like Nokia and Blackberry dominated the market. In fact, Nokia sold 435 million phones that year, taking 40% of the global market for the first time, and posted the best financial results in its history.

If you asked customers what they wanted next, the answers would probably have sounded familiar.

So, competition focused on improving existing products: making phones smaller, adding features, improving battery life.

Nokia was not out of touch or complacent. It was working flat out. Enormous effort and enormous sums of money went into improving the things customers described, while the thing that actually frustrated them went unexamined.

Few people would have asked for a phone without a physical keyboard that could browse the internet properly, download apps and replace an MP3 player, camera and sat-nav all at once.

Not because customers lacked imagination, but because people naturally describe improvements using what they already know.

And that’s where Apple offers a crucial distinction.

Before the iPhone, people were often carrying multiple devices. A phone for communication, a camera for photographs etc. Apple recognised that the frustration wasn’t just in the quality of each individual device but in managing all of them.

The opportunity was to simplify the entire experience.

At launch, Apple positioned the iPhone as three devices in one: a phone, an iPod, and an internet device.

Rather than asking customers to invent the next product, they paid attention to the frustrations they experienced every day. Instead of listening for requests, they observed problems.

Nokia, meanwhile, kept growing for a while. It was still the biggest phone maker in the world in 2010. However, that ended in 2012 when Samsung took the lead, ending fourteen years of Nokia dominance. By 2014 the phone business had been sold to Microsoft. All that effort, all that money, all that genuine hard work, spent on the wrong thing.

It’s easy and convenient to ask customers, “What would you like us to do?”. Their answers can be useful. But they are almost always framed around today’s way of doing things. And, importantly, they don’t necessarily reveal the real issue.

The more revealing question is often: “What is frustrating about your experience?”

The lesson from Apple isn’t that businesses should ignore customer feedback. It’s that we can’t expect customers to solve the problems for us.

Customers are experts in their own experience. They can tell us where things feel difficult, confusing or disappointing. But they can’t necessarily tell us why. From that, we can work backwards to uncover what’s causing those problems. Which is exactly what I do with the EmpowerPathway.

I use customer experience as the starting point, tracing it back through processes, priorities and decision-making until the real causes come into focus. Because solving the right problem is always more valuable than simply responding to the loudest request.

Nokia’s customers were not unhappy. Apple found what was frustrating them anyway. That’s worth thinking about.