Marketing Apple: Secrets of the World's Best Marketing Machine

Final Cut Pro X, Avid and Apple's Marketing Strategy

UPDATE 7/5: Nice job Avid (Hi Paul!)

 

I love it when worlds collide.

As many of you know, I worked at Apple for about a decade and left to run product marketing for a startup (Bowstreet) at the beginning of the original dot.com bubble.  What many of you don't know is that right after Bowstreet I joined Avid Technology to help save them from being put out of business by - you guessed it - Apple.

See in those days Avid was the king of media. It is not an exaggeration to say that EVERY major movie, television program and/or song was touched in some way by Avid's tools.  Their brands: Avid Media Composer, Digidesign Pro Tools, and Avid Unity media management were known and loved by real professionals who produce the world's best media every day.

Trouble was, as much as these customer loved the tools, they hated the company for many years of predatory pricing practices and other arrogances.  Customers were ready to leave the moment Apple launched Final Cut Pro and Apple went out of its way to attract these customers with the promise of lower prices, better tools and more collegial relationships. One of my many roles at Avid was to rebuild the strained relationships with our customers (this is a good recounting of how we did that - hi Marianna!) But having better discussions with our customers wouldn't save Avid.  Not only did we have to double-down on the solutions those professionals needed (by launching Mojo, Adrenaline and Nitris) but we also had to - gulp - outmarket Apple.

And we did!  I could write a book on how I helped Avid compete with (and beat) Apple at their own marketing game: launching Avid FreeDV while Steve Jobs was still on the MacWorld stage introducing Final Cut Express; including both Mac and Windows installers in the same box and encouraging pros to install on more than one computer; adding professional color correction tools into Avid Xpress DV v3.5 and launching it at the Final Cut Pro User's Group in Hollywood while getting Steve Jobs to provide a quote in the Avid press release alongside Avid's own CEO.  I could go on and on.  The moral of this story is that we had to listen more, work harder, innovate faster and deliver the solutions these professionals needed all while beating the marketing drum louder than ever.  I'm proud to say that these efforts took Avid from death's doorstep to record growth (the stock climbed from $9/share to $65/share and the company broke through the $1B annual revenue barrier after 14 years of trying) - all by focusing solely on the needs of the professional market it created.

What's amusing and a bit sad about this week's horrific launch of Final Cut Pro X is that Apple is now making the (rare) marketing mistake of telling these professionals what they want instead of giving them what they are asking for - all with the typical Apple marketing silence.  Such arrogance works in a consumer market where your average person doesn't really know what they want until they see it (the Henry Ford "faster horse" argument) - but this approach does not work in an enterprise or professional market where people's careers are built - and risked - by delivering results. Pro customers who moved away from Avid bet their own personal brands on Apple - and are rightly concerned when it seems that Apple has turned its back on them for the safety (and possible additional revenue) of the consumer market.

When was the last time we've seen Apple's brand hammered in major print articles with headlines like "debacle" and "troubling"?  When was the last time NYTimes columnist David Pogue (who got his start writing for MacWorld magazine) wrote a followup article to defuse the venom generated by his first one?  Apple has long leveraged the power of fanatical, cult-like users even with a trivial marketshare.  Well, Apple is now witnessing the power of these same vocal users uniting against it - and Apple must listen and react.  To do nothing risks the contagion spreading as more videos like this one from the Conan O'Brien Show overflow to the average Joe Consumer:

Steve has been called the Henry Ford and Thomas Edison of our age and he is my personal hero.  You can bet he is listening to all the FCPX negativity as he did with MobileMe and Antennagate. He famously said "We want to make all our users happy. If you don’t know that, you don’t know Apple."  Well now it is time to see if the world's best marketing machine can live up to its billing and if these professional users will be happy with Apple again soon.

Me, I'm still rooting for Avid.  Now about that book...

Apple Marketing drives retail successes

UPDATE: 6/17: Even better story today in Forbes (and free) that really dovetails with my free ebook about the Apple Marketing approach to retail stores.

Good (but not free) story today in the Wall Street Journal about how Apple has made its retail presence such a positive success.

Walk into an Apple Store and you'll feel less like you are in a retail outlet (where are the cash registers and checkout counters) and more like you are in a museum.  Well before the iPad made touch a natural gesture, and even as most retailers hid their best products behind glass, Apple made their stores a touch-worthy experience.  Touch anything, stay as long as you want, ask as many questions as necessary and feel free to borrow our WiFi.

Apparently nothing is left to chance - even the interaction between potential customers and store employees is carefully scripted, not unlike a Steve Jobs' keynote presentation.  And it should be this way.  What Apple knows (and most other retailers forget) is that a company's lasting (or fleeting) relationship with their customers begins immediately after customers purchase something from you.  Apple's careful cultivation of that experience is one of the many magic (and tightly managed) elements of the Apple brand.  Apple has to be more than the sum of its employees - it has to become an experience - borrowed from Disney and wielded like Nike - that captivates and motivates normal people to action.  And that action - buying something - now more than ever starts in an Apple Store.

So credit Ron Johnson, soon to be former Apple Executive and new JCPenney President and CEO, for making the experience one that drives millions of people to otherwise boring and depressing indoor malls.  We can only hope that the Apple Magic will rub off and the other mall anchor store can become as much a draw for Dockers and vacuum cleaners and family portraits as Apple is for irresistable technology.

BTW, did you know that the "C" in "JCPenney" stands for "Cash"?  Just the announcement of Ron as a JCPenney employee increased the market value of JCP by $1B.  Now that's cash!

Great Apple Marketing Built the World's Most Valuable Brand

After many years of trailing Google, today Apple finally became the world's most valuable brand.  This according to the BrandZ index which determines how brand value contributes to earnings, the value of intangible assets, and measures how customers percieve brands.  They also estimate the brand's potential for growth...and Apple is off the chart.

In a nutshell, if you are a marketer - take note and share this with the rest of your executive team: Apple's brand is worth about 1/3 its total market cap.  Carefully cultivating what the world thinks about your company can be just as important as how you run your business.

Take a page from Apple and help the world see why your brand is important: brands are life preservers.  When in doubt, customers struggling to figure out what to buy often simply go where the crowd goes.  It's one of my secrets of Apple marketing: people don't buy products, people buy what other people have.  Great brands help wield that transformational power.

Apple iPad 2 Commercial Success

I'm a fan of very simple, elegant commercials.  So is Apple. 

This one speaks for itself.  What does it say to you?

Apple marketing strategy drives earnings and hides iCloud secret

Apple had another blowout quarter.  No surprise there.

But what's hidden in the numbers is a surprise.  Tremendous optimism for the new Apple Cloud strategy - iCloud - that is only partly revealed.  As I mentioned in a previous post about AirPlay, Apple is looking to change the way the world experiences video in a more massive way than it how it changed the way we listen to music.

With music, we already had Walkman and radio players with headphones.  Steve Jobs liberated us from our desktops by allowing us to take all our music with us anywhere we go.  But the priviledge - which remade an entire industry around iTunes - still chained us to our desks to sync and backup all our songs.

With my iPad, I now let Netflix worry about storing and saving all those movies - all I do is click a button and watch what I want, where I want with narry a concern about actually owning or backing up a single video file.

This then is the Apple iCloud vision: to provide you with access to all your media wherever you go.  When you buy a song or movie with iTunes it will be available to you anywhere, just log onto iCloud.  At a friends house and want to watch your shows?  Just log on with your AppleID via her AppleTV and watch away.  At grandma's house and want to show her a video of the grandkids?  Pull out her iPad and log into iCloud...there it is.

If you are a Netflix user like me you already know how liberating this is for movies and television shows.  Now add to that vision all your photos, all your music, all your iPhone videos, your contacts, your emails, someday even all your apps.  All your media will be "with you" wherever you go - reminds me of the line from Buckaroo Bonzai (or was it Confucius?) "No Matter Where You Go, There You Are"

 

 

 

Apple Marketing without an Apple Product (funny)

Conan O'brien gives us an idea how the next Apple product could be marketed...even without knowing what the product is.  Pretty funny (and not that far off!)

 

Skype borrows from Apple's Marketing Strategy to demonstrate the power of video

In my next few blog posts, I want to discuss the power of video. I have been doing some homework on how much video we consume over the Internet. Astonishingly, in February, 170 Million Americans watched online videos representing 84% of the connected US audience. The average amount of video each user watched was nearly 14 hours. Another way to say it: almost everyone is watching video online. And our expectations for quality video grows along with our consumption appetite. The bar has risen on marketing teams to use video in a more powerful way.

Recently Skype introduced group video chat. Rather than create a typical product launch video with a talking head showing how to use the product, Skype created this beautiful word-less video showing the power of visual communications accompanied by a haunting, memorable music overlay: (please don't blame me if you can't get this tune out of your head or if you are motivated to try playing it yourself on GarageBand.)

Skype has clearly taken an Apple-esque approach to launching a new feature: focus the viewer not on how to use Skype video chat but on what Skype video chat can do for you.

iPad is changing the face of TV

I know there has been some hoopla around the eventuality of AirPlay coming to a television set near you.  But not much has been made of the fact that the iPad is already changing the face of television today.  The ABC iPad app is amazing (where are Fox and NBC?), Netflix has grown dramatically since the iPad was launched (no coincidence there) and now the networks are upset with Time Warner's new live streaming app (which was the top free app in the AppStore for 3 days in a row this week) because it changes the rules that broadcasters have had to live under since the advent of television.

Today's announcement by the NCAA was stunning (yet somehow hidden in the numbers): 8 million people viewed the tournaments on 4 different cable networks...but 27 million viewed it online and via iPad and iPhone apps.  I did some other homework on video streaming recently.  More than twice the number of people watched Obama's inauguration online than on all the television networks combined.  Social, mobile devices like the iPad are rewriting the rules of television and all advertisers, marketers, developers and consumers need to be ready.

Mark my words: within a few years all your media will stream to you on your mobile device and Apple will lead this revolution.  What do you think that huge Apple datacenter (reportedly bigger than Amazon's or Google's) in North Carolina for?

Now my only question: Charter where is your iPad app??

 

 

The Power of App(arel) Marketing

I got a good mention in this week's New York Times in a story about how the clothes an executive wears often says a good deal about him or her.  After all, if we're so impressed by great Apple marketing (which often starts with the packaging or the store or the website), isn't what someone wears the first thing people see?  So isn't this where people who are marketing themselves should start?

Is Steve Jobs' turtleneck and jeans a causal outfit, a uniform or does it say something more about him?  I remember reading how Albert Einstein kept identical copies of the one suit he owned so he wouldn't waste a moment of time wondering what to wear any day - ostensibly so he could focus on more meaningful questions. All that brainpower and yet he didn't want to fret about something so insignificant as the clothes he wore.  Perhaps Steve thinks the same way...

I'm curious, what does your CEO wear to work?  Does she dress for success or dress down to imply that he is one of you?  Would love to get your input in this blog's comment section.

 

Apple Marketing Steve Jobs' Health

Today Apple announced that Steve Jobs was taking another leave of absence to focus on his health.  Lots of folks are discussing this today - and I'm personally worried more than usual because of the uncanny timing of the announcement.

You see, today the markets are closed for Dr. Martin Luther King's Birthday and tomorrow Apple announces its Q1 2011 earnings.  The marketing wizards at Apple must know that Steve's health announcement would send the stock dipping but that the earnings news would bring it right back up. To announce today seems like an attempt to mitigate the full reaction in the share price.

Apple hasn't earned any good will in their transparency when sharing Steve's health conditions in the past and today's announcement won't help.  Never has there been one man so vital to the success of one company than Steve is to Apple - but that means the Company should go to extraordinary lengths to soothe investor's nerves. 

Time will tell if this was good timing or simply a needed break for Mr. Jobs.  But one thing is certain: we all wish that Steve gets better soon.

UPDATE: Gizmodo's blog nearly made me cry.  And I agree.  As someone who worked there for many years and as a person who can define his own life having a thread woven by Apple (my job, my home, and my family have all been touched deeply over the last 30 years by Apple) it is important to realize that Apple isn't just a company or a business.  It's an invention, an American success story and a love story all rolled into one. Finding someone who truly loves Apple as much as Steve (or me) will be hard to find.