Apple Commercials Signal Big Positioning Departure

(MoneyWatch)  Sometimes it's the big things that show how a company is changing, and sometimes it's the little things. Then there are the times it's both. In this case, I'm talking about the Apple commercials for the Mac. Not just the most recent ones, but the series and the trends they're showing. What we're seeing is effectively communicating a strong shift in Apple's product positioning in a direction quite different from where the company has been before.

Think about Apple's historic positioning of the Mac. First it started with the famous 1984 commercial, calling to a sense of being creative in the face of overpowering authorities. Eventually this coalesced into, and I really don't mean this pejoratively, a classic snob appeal. Apple presents itself as the sine qua non of personal computing -- something that cannot be touched by a Wintel PC -- and charge a premium. It's essentially looking for customers to buy into a perception of the products as being superior and worth paying for. This is a classic luxury brand. But one of the dangers in this sort of positioning is the danger of moving downscale by acknowledging the supposedly inferior products. In its heyday, Rolls Royce would never have compared itself to a Volkswagen Beetle, even though the one icon oversold the other by many times.

In the past, Apple has been smart about this, focusing on conveying a sense of added value. In other words, it would market to get people to buy what a Mac offered above a Wintel PC. However, the recent Mac versus PC series, particularly in the newest ones, Apple has completely changed its approach. The sales argument is not that Macs are superior, but that PCs are inferior. That may sound like a case of distinction without difference, but I think there is a change, albeit subtle. It's an approach that essentially says that Macs and PCs do exactly the same thing, but that PCs are flawed. Apple has completely walked into Microsoft's value marketing court. By doing so, it raises the question of whether, by only doing what PCs are supposed to do, but without the problems, is it really a premium product worth extra pay, or a product that should be at a parity in price? That goes completely in the face of Apple's strategy.

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