Apple's First Ad for iPhone 4S: Branding Failure in Action
Apple's (AAPL) first ad for the new iPhone 4S makes you wonder why the company didn't just rebrand the device iPhone 5 -- the device everyone was hoping for -- and be done with it. From a branding and consumer point of view, iPhone 4S could easily have gotten away with the iPhone 5 moniker, despite complaints from tech nerds that it wasn't new enough.
New product launches at Apple are always eagerly anticipated. On Tuesday, however, Apple triggered howls of frustration by announcing that it was not launching a completely new iPhone 5, but rather iPhone 4S, an improvement on iPhone 4. Everyone seems to think it's a dud.
But take a look at the ad (and if you're a gadget geek) pretend you don't know anything about phones:
The spot doesn't break any new creative ground, it's essentially the traditional product demo that Apple publishes right before it launches a new flight of 30-second TV ads. But the demo describes so many new features in the iPhone 4S that it leaves you thinking, why didn't they just call it the iPhone 5? Here's what's new:
- A dual-core A5 chip that's twice as fast as the old one making graphics load seven times quicker and web pages load twice as fast.
- Siri, a personal assistant that lets you operate the whole phone through voice commands.
- Intelligent call switching between two antennas to send and receive calls.
- A bigger 8 megapixel camera with intelligent focusing.
- Stabilized video shooting.
- iOS 5.
- iCloud.
It's just a name, but names are important. They're brands. And this is a failure of branding. The new phone seems to have received "marginal upgrade" status because the techies who rule the company don't believe it's new enough.
But those people aren't Apple's customers. From the customers' point of view, we wanted iPhone 5 and Apple had a nice new phone to launch. But for some reason the company launched an unsatisfactory object simply by giving it the wrong name.
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