Apple basks in iPhone buzznews analysis As iPhone Week dawns, one thing is clear: Marketing is a lot easier--and cheaper--if you let other people do it for you.
Say what you want about Apple, its products, its leader, and its fans, but the company has figured out how to appeal to consumers like no other company in technology--and with a smaller marketing budget than companies like Intel, Microsoft or Hewlett-Packard. Apple has perfected the art of buzz during the Internet's second act, Web 2.0. "They simply do a masterful job of capturing the imagination of just about everyone," wrote Jim Lattin, a professor of marketing at Stanford University's graduate business school, in an email interview. Traditional ways of reaching potential customers are changing rapidly, as any newspaper employee will tell you. Some companies have plunged headlong into a new media frenzy, setting up shop inside virtual worlds such as Second Life or trying to create "grassroots" viral video campaigns.
"It's easy to get the tech enthusiasts to line up but the mass market consumer, that's another story."
--Michael Gartenberg, Jupiter Research analyst
But a passionate, almost evangelical base of supporters makes any marketing campaign easier. Apple's reliance on a horde of loyal fans thirsty for information is the catalyst for its marketing. Usually, Apple likes to announce its products and start the marketing effort very close to the actual date those products are available, if not the same day, said Ross Rubin, an analyst with The NPD Group. That wasn't an option this time around, since the Federal Communications Commission posts information on its Web site about phones that it approves for sale, denying Apple the opportunity to control the way people first learned about the iPhone, he said. Instead, Apple launched the product with a minimum of information, and since January loyalists have flooded Apple-oriented blogs such as AppleInsider, The Unofficial Apple Weblog or MacRumors.com, searching for any scrap of information related to Apple and the iPhone. Gadget blogs such as Engadget and Gizmodo stoke the fire further with their acerbic takes on the Apple universe. Engadget actually caused a brief plunge in Apple's stock in May when it reported, and then retracted, a story that Apple was planning to delay the iPhone until October. That was a sure sign that any information related to Apple, and especially the iPhone, is being scrutinized by fanboys and Wall Street investors like perhaps no other product launch. Larger Web sites and media outlets see intense demand for iPhone-related traffic heading to other sites, and are compelled to follow suit. Apple is launching the iPhone at a time when content aggregation sites like Digg, Techmeme, and even Google News can put a potential customer before hundreds, if not thousands, of possibly interesting stories about the product. All Apple has to do is trickle out information every now and then, as it has done in the weeks leading up to Friday's launch, and watch the frenzy take hold. Traditional marketing isn't dead yet, however. Apple has been running several television commercials of late on major broadcast and cable networks showing off the user interface of the iPhone, and influential reviewers for dead-tree repackaging outlets such as The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg and The New York Times' David Pogue are likely to devote their Thursday columns to the iPhone. |
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