learnthe4ps.com - For students of marketing.

Apple used to be known for high priced, but elegant, hardware.  That is no longer the case.  This article provides a nice example of two concepts that you will cover when you get to Price.  A skim price policy is offering high prices on products to a smaller market before moving later to more price sensitive customers.  A penetration price policy tries to sell the whole market at one low price.  In the old days Apple was a niche player known for high prices.  Now it owns some markets (tablet computers, smartphones, portable music players) and benefits from economies of scale.  The company offers even lower prices by keeping older products in its line and offering them for lower prices.  It will be interesting to see how they respond to the new Kindle Fire.  Read more at “Apple’s Lower Prices Are All Part of the Plan” (New York Times, October 23, 2011).

What do you think is Apple’s price policy?  Do you think it is a good policy?  Why or why not?

There are plenty of articles (even a whole issue of BusinessWeek) paying tribute to Steve Jobs this week.  As much as we respect Jobs, we weren’t going to join the chorus because we didn’t have anything new or marketing-specific to say.  Then we found this 1997 video of Steve Jobs talking to Apple staff.  Jobs had recently returned to the company he founded (he had been unceremoniously booted in 1985).

In the video Jobs explains what he thinks “marketing” is — actually explaining positioning — and introduces the new “Think Different” campaign.

“To me, marketing is about values,” he said. “This is a very complicated world, a very noisy world and we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember us. No company is. So we have to be very clear about what we want people to know about us.”

Some of you may not know that Jobs returned to a company with crippling losses and record low stock prices back in the mid-1990s. Apple’s market share in computers was less than 5% (it now may be over 15% based on recent numbers), there were no iPods, iPads, or iPhones.

What do you think of the video and Apple’s “Think Different” approach?  For what kinds of products would this approach to positioning work best?

This article “The iPad Leads Apple to the Elderly” (describes how the ease of use of the iPad appeals to the elderly.  The examples are mostly from Japan — where a fast growing elderly population make it a prime target market.  The examples here work when talking about opportunities (chapter 2 in our books), demographic trends or market segmentation.

What else could Apple do to make the iPad more appealing to this target market?  Think about all 4 Ps.

If the “Get a Mac” campaign is winding down, you may want to review it.  Over at AdWeek’s AdFreak.com you can see all 66 (as of this writing) TV spots at “Apple and TBWA’s ‘Get a Mac:  The Complete Campaign.”  The campaign started in May 2006.  Here is one of the earliest ads in the series from October 2006.