The following is a personal journey of branding, and changing positions in the market place.
My first ever computer was a small Mac SE-20. It had a six inch black and white screen with just a few programs running on it (I think one was Space Invaders) and cost me $800 second hand. I then had to use a windows PC at work and found the operations clunky compared with intuitive interface of the Mac. I would argue with my brothers and work colleagues explaining the benefits, but the response was always the same. “I use windows at work and I don’t need to relearn a different system, it’s more expensive and don’t all computers do the same thing?” For us die hard Mac fans the early days were a lonely existence yelling at the wall.
In the mid 90’s Mac’s only held around 3% of the PC market with windows machines taking the lion’s share of the business market. Apple seemed to be destined to be a niche product for desktop publishers and the media industry. It wasn’t until Steve Jobs return and the release of the IMac that they changed tack. Rather than focusing on the functionality they began to concentrate on the look of the machine and turn it into a fashion icon. The simpler transparent design appealed and sales started to turn around.
With changes in music technology and the ability to compress CD audio files to one tenth of their original size it allowed the development of mp3 players with the capacity to store, share and download a large quantity of songs on a portable hard drive/media player. There were other mp3 players on the market but Apple concentrated on a streamed lined design, combined with their software library of ITunes to steal the market with the IPod.
At that stage mobile phone companies didn’t treat this too seriously as MP3 players were being incorporated into the next generation of smartphones. The theory was that people would want to carry one overall device and IPod would be obsolete as people use their phone to fulfil all their mobile computing/media needs. What they hadn’t counted on was Apples ability to adapt and create its own mobile phone which took advantage of the ability to surf the web on a mobile device with a larger screen size and a touch capacity virtual keyboard. With the IPhone they again relied on an eye catching design and transformed the phone to a remote computer. When released the first IPhone had actually less hardware specs than its competitors but the brand now was considered to be a desirable item by the general public. Its larger version, the IPad, was released soon afterwards with a similar response from the market.
Traditional mobile phone manufacturers were caught off guard and eventually had to adopt the large touch screen design of Apple to compete. This form of mimicry also changed the fortunes of Samsung who at that stage were a small player in the mobile phone market. They made a series of cheaper phones, with larger touch screens using Googles Android system. Now this market is dominated by these 2 players with traditional companies such as Nokia and Blackberry struggling for survival. The comment was made that Nokia was primarily focused on good hardware (Nokia Lumia can survive being attacked by a hack saw blade) but they used an ageing software that was developed for the mobile phone to be used as a phone, not as a mobile computer. With Apple they paid equal attention to the hardware as well as the software.
Here we see the ability to diversify the main product to upsell to a wider audience (Understanding the sales process, the psychology behind Customer Behaviour). It also shows competition as being a driver for innovation and how quickly a market place can change when manufacturers don’t consider the needs of the consumer or rely on just their traditional stable of products (Product Positioning, How you stand out against your competitors). Even when successful, there is the threat of rivals creating substitute products to take back some of your market share (Cash Cows and Lazy Dogs). All of these instances you can see played out in this scenario. Apple didn’t know by market research that the public would want the IPhone. They took a punt as they had created something new so they had no market research to justify whether this would work, but they had a sufficient product range to be able to take the risk.
Next we shall look at developments in Contact resource management systems in the sales cycle.
Malcolm Ford has had 25 years business experience and has been involved conducting marketing campaigns for companies both in the UK and in Australia. He currently resells and implements Enterprise software systems.
