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

First Apple Launch without Steve Jobs

So I already knew that Apple wasn't releasing an iPhone 5 today - remember gang, there was no iPhone 2 or iPhone 3 (we went from iPhone to iPhone 3G to denote the new carrier).  We also don't have an iMac 3 or an iPod 5, and the numbering scheme for iPhone 4 was really an anomoly.

So don't read too much into Apple product numbers.  But I am concerned about three rare product launch slip ups that never would have happened if Steve was minding the store.

The first problem: Apple.com was unreachable for more than an hour today.  Ok, the Store is something Apple always takes down before a product launch and then they time the home page to update as soon as Steve (er Tim) is done with his keynote.  But here is how Apple.com looked for hours after today's launch:

Apple.com was down?  That's huge news by itself.  And if that wasn't bad enough, look at what the images of the iPhone 4S looked like on the Apple website after the Apple pages were finally brought online:

Really?  Look at those white corners in the images of the iPhones? Anyone who knows web graphics knows you need to make those white corners transparent so the shadow effect is preserved.  Here they look like they were hastily posted without someone noticing that problem.

And finally, around an hour before the keynote all the details of the iPhone 4S and the new iPod nano was announced on Apple's Japan website for the world to see.  Whoops.

While none of these issues are earth-shattering in their own right (well, Apple.com going down is pretty big) I only hope this isn't the first visible signs that Steve's steady hand is required for Apple to continue to deliver great products - and experiences - that truly surprise and delight.

Come on Tim, your team has done better! (and we're all rooting for you)

P.S. I do take some delight in noticing that all the dates on the iPhone Siri screenshot - May 19 - is my birthday.

Steve Jobs' Legacy and the Power of Apple Marketing

I have heard from many friends since Steve Jobs' resignation.  As we discuss frequently on this blog it is clear that Steve changed the way people relate to technology.  Before Steve computers were relegated to the white-coated high priests of the raised-floor, air conditioned labs where mere mortals never dared tread.  Steve changed all that - giving us first the "Computer for the Rest of Us" and then eventually changing the way everyone consumes their music, movies, magazines and even the Internet.

Steve will long be equated with the small letter "i" - at once meaning Internet, innovation, inspiration but most importantly individual.  He leaves a legacy as our generation's Thomas Edison: both proud, determined inventors who would not rest until they sparked equal technological and cultural revolutions literally empowering people to reach higher and dream bigger.

Some day I will tell the story on this blog about how I got my first job at Apple and how I resigned during Apple's darkest days...only to be invited back by Steve Jobs to help him save the company.  That story reminds me of the transformational power of a true leader.  A person who with one breath convinced me to take a chance on the future when - on paper - Apple didn't have one.  That same leadership and unwavering attention to detail and the belief that people deserved better is what sparked the iMac (which begat the iBook, iPod, iPhone and iPad) and began the love affair we now have with technology - formerly cold, austere and beige and now sleek, reflective and affectionate.  In many ways - thanks to Steve - our romance with technology has only just begun.

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??