What Apple Marketing Did Right
The post "Apple Marketing's Top 10 Dumb Mistakes" predictably created a shorts-in-a-twist situation among Apple-uber-alles crowd. It astounds me that anybody could think that a company that was saved from oblivion by a Hail Mary like the iPod has great marketing, but then, we're talking Apple here, and Apple is a cult as well as a corporation.
What's interesting about the slew of negative comments is that nobody seemed to be able to come up with any examples of brilliant marketing from Apple, other than its "I'm a Mac" commercials. So I figure I'll step up to the bar and explain exactly what Apple marketing is doing right:
- Apple marketing did NOT open the iPod/iPhone/iPad to cloning. The company (like the rest of the computer industry, hence the xBox) learned its lesson and realized that proprietary is good and not worth trading away in order to grow market share.
- Apple marketing launched the iTunes concept. This might be considered an engineering idea, but it's really a distribution methodology, so I'm going to give the credit for it to the marketing group, rather than the engineering group.
- Apple marketing keeps product packaging simple. All things considered, this is a fairly minor issue, but Apple's uncluttered packaging is a breath of fresh air in a field dominated by busy logos and meaningless lists of product features. (See the video below.)
Now, that video does point out something that Apple marketing does better than average. However, that's not so much a major wonderfulness at Apple as a statement on the abysmal state of marketing inside other high tech firms. (The satire targets Microsoft, but it's just one of many offenders.)
Overall, here's my take on this issue. Apple's marketing is marginally better that most other high tech firms, but only because the bar has been set so low. They still make mistakes, and some of them have been huge.