Question

Evaluate the effectiveness of APPLE INC's existing branding efforts. What does the evaluation suggest for the new product or service? Support your response with relevant analysis

Answer 1

Apple is one of the greatest marketers of all time, but even it can stumble. Apple’s consistent marketing excellence is built on some core disciplines, which others would benefit from learning from and applying. At the same time, as in so many other parts of management, strengths can easily become weaknesses or points of vulnerability.

Marketers who aspire to reach Apple’s heights need to look closely at the reasons for Apple’s consistent reign at the top. But it’s not enough to simply try to copy Apple. Each of these marketing practices can backfire without careful attention and top-notch execution, as Apple is seeing right now.

1. Create an Experience Ecosystem. Apple has a legendary focus on the customer experience. Every customer touch point (products, the website, ads, app store, and retail store) yields a consistent Apple experience. Over the last 10 years, Apple has aggressively expanded the areas where the Apple experience is part of daily life. By encouraging app builders but rigidly enforcing standards, Apple ensures that the universe of Apple-mediated behaviours continually expands. By innovating product form factor and function from computing in either your pocket or on your wrist, to paying for all your purchases, to opening your hotel room, to controlling all of your home electronics, to reminding you of your calorie count or parking spot… all of these experiences are connected, integrated, and packaged in a singular accessible ecosystem of complementary products. Additionally, Apple has focused on innovation beyond the core by creating the infrastructure to enable this ecosystem in a secure and seamless fashion (think Apple Pay secure payments or biometric facial recognition on the iphone X). The most tangible example, of course, is in Apple stores. Apple overturned conventional retailing wisdom when it created its stores, putting experience before “selling.” It’s continued building on that success by further removing “store” from its retail branding because it sees its stores as so much more.

2. Foster a Community of Evangelists. Apple has always empowered customers who “think differently”—seeking to inspire customers to do things in unique and creative ways. However, as its products have become more ubiquitous, Apple has had to work harder to maintain that focus. For students, artists, and entrepreneurs, Apple has sought to build community and bring more customers into the fold. Currently, Apple offers youth programs, such as free classes for children learning to code, to capture the imaginations of future consumers. Apple is also turning its retail locations into “town squares.” At select venues, the company is building “The Plaza’—an area open 24-hours a day with free Wi-Fi, public seating, and weekend concerts. Another feature is “The Forum”—an area surrounded by a 6K Video Wall and “Today at Apple,” a program that brings talented artists, photographers, musicians, and other visionaries together to further ideate on their passions. According to Angela Ahrendts, VP of Retail, “We are renewing our focus on liberal arts—humanizing technology through experiences that educate and entertain visitors and empower entrepreneurs.”

3. Organize Sales and Marketing by Customer, not Product. Apple targets four main B2B customers education, government, SME, and enterprise. For the diverse SME and enterprise segments, the company organizes its sales teams based on the industry served, not products sold. Salespeople work on teams that focus on different types of customers. For example, a former biomedical engineer with experience working in hospitals might be assigned to small-to-medium sized accounts in healthcare, while a sales rep with a financial services background might be assigned to work on a team selling comprehensive solutions to banks and credit unions. The benefit of this approach is that it ensures the salesperson really understands the customer and can offer solutions from across the Apple portfolio to best meet customer needs. In the same vein, Apple hires sales reps for its retail stores from all walks of life. In this way, they can embody every type of person that walks into an Apple store and thus connect more genuinely.

4. Control Pricing. Have you ever seen new Apple products with deep discounts during Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Apple’s marketers leverage pricing with very little discounting as a tool to convey the brand in the same way as luxury retailers. This strategy extends to the microcosm of Apple retailers, dealers, and resellers, where Apple uses “minimum advertised price” (or MAP) to keep prices relatively comparable to its own stores and minimal wholesale discounts to prevent retailers from passing discounts onto consumers. While many other technology retailers might use discounting to drive demand, Apple focuses less on acquiring new customers through price and, instead, by making them loyal to Apple products by offering an outstanding customer experience.

5. Use Customer-based Metrics. At most stores, the salesperson works tirelessly to up-sell, cross-sell, any-kind-of-sell, often leaving customers confused and frustrated. Since 2007, Apple has used the Net Promoter Score (NPS), an index that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products to other people, as a critical indicator of success and of a customer's brand loyalty. Apple manages nearly all 500 retail locations and its staff using NPS scores. NPS feedback is collected and shared with store teams daily—all negative feedback is addressed within 24 hours with a personal call from a store manager. NPS is also used to guide decisions ranging across employee promotions to long-term strategy.

6. Unpack Simplicity. Apple has mastered the art of minimalism—where product aesthetics, user interfaces, the brand logo, support functions, and even advertising are stripped down to the fundamentals. Products have simple, clean lines, with even simpler, self-explanatory names. The core purpose of this simplicity is to make the products easy to use so they can be understood and easily adopted by non-experts. As Steve Jobs said, “The way we’re running the company, the product design, the advertising, it all comes down to this: Let’s make it simple. Really simple.” Apple focuses not only on making products simple but also intuitive, meaning there is tremendous attention to every last detail, even the unboxing experience. This makes products more enjoyable to use. Apple Support is equally seamless, providing targeted software counsel to consumers in seconds. Finally, Apple carries this principle through to its advertising. A typical Apple advertisement or billboard has the product name and a clean picture of the product—no technical specs, pricing, or expensive special effects.

7. Start ‘With the Why’. A common tech marketing misstep is focusing on technical features, not customer benefits. This is the classic marketing myopia that Theodore Levitt wrote about in 1960 in the Harvard Business Review: “In the ease of electronics, the greatest danger which faces the glamorous new companies in this field is not that they do not pay enough attention to research and development, but that they pay too much attention to it.” Tech companies are not in the technology business—they are in the business of providing customer benefits (just like every firm, no matter its industry). Apple understood early on that its products must fill a customer need and inspire first, and that this should be the focus of marketing efforts. As Simon Sine puts it, this approach helps Apple ‘start with the why’ and therefore more effectively connects with its customers. While PC salespeople talk about megabytes, gigapixels, and processing power, Apple employees have been trained to do exactly the opposite. Their “Specialists” are taught not to speak in jargon, but instead to speak to benefits and aspirations to the customer. For example, to customers more memory means more photos, texts, and videos; ultimately experiences and memories, not just gigs. These conversations are enhanced in “Genius Groves,” an evolution of the “Genius Bar” where trees and seating build an even more customer centric and supportive experience.

8. Act Global. Whether you’re in Macao or Milan, Brussels or Beijing, you’ll recognize the iPhone’s standardized sleek design, minimalism, and ease of use that appeal across the globe while instilling the Apple experience with nuanced local features important to consumers. For example, one Apple Store in Paris is housed in a Haussmann-style building to reflect Parisians’ architectural preferences. The ‘Mac versus PC’ campaign in Japan, where direct-comparison ads are considered tasteless, was tailored to more subtly address differing product attributes in way that wasn’t nearly as direct as the equivalent Western campaigns. Although the colour red is off brand for Apple, in China the company has run red packaging promotions during Chinese New Year to better connect with that market through a colour that evokes luck and fortune. Such marketing and product moves have allowed Apple to stay true to its brand identity, while quickly expanding sales to over 100 countries. Likewise, while Apple ensures its ecommerce websites have a uniform look and branding regardless of country, it has greatly customized the languages working with translators and copywriters to ensure local ease of understanding.

9. Foster the Employer Brand. Apple has built such a strong brand in part because it attracts the talent to continually do so. Top talent recognizes the exceptional professional development opportunities synonymous with the Apple brand and the brand cache that comes with having Apple on their resumes. Apple employees are given the same opportunity to think differently and challenge the status quo as Apple gives its own customers. They are also given a state-of-the-art campus, Apple Park, as the work environment to support their creativity. Like every product, each detail of this cutting-edge structure is intentional to foster an environment where design and collaboration are at the forefront and where employees have a unique workplace experience. Even the office chairs, sourced from Barber Osgerby, are intentional in how their design reinforces the in-office experience Apple seeks to offer its employees. Tim Cook believes that “Ultimately, it’s on the company leaders to set the tone. Not only the CEO, but the leaders across the company. If you select them so carefully that they then hire the right people, it’s a nice self-fulfilling prophecy.”

10. Do What Is Right. Just before the launch of Apple Music, Taylor Swift wrote an open letter to Apple, decrying the decision to not pay artists during Apple Music’s 3-month free trial period. She rightly pointed out that the policy was deeply harmful to smaller artists unable to make an income from touring. That very evening, Apple publicly announced that Swift’s letter made it re-think the decision and change their minds. This turned what could have been a huge brand blow amongst Apple’s core creative community into a public relations coup that helped promote Apple Music before it was even launched. Paying for music while giving it away free for 3 months was costly for Apple. However, the long-term gain of addressing this situation, fostering a dialogue with artists and showing that the company cared about creators big and small was a huge boon to the brand perception. Likewise, in 2014, a court asked Apple to unlock an iPhone belonging to the man who shot 14 people in San Bernardino. Apple declined to help the FBI stating that if the FBI could access this phone, they could eventually do it for many others. Consumers are increasingly concerned with data privacy, especially in light of recent exposures of the NSA and government surveillance. Apple chose to publicly defend the civil liberties of its customers. This continued effort to fight for strong encryption and protect customer data has built trust among its customers.