The Apple of today and the IBM of 1989
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 23rd Mar 2012 15:09 UTC
PDAs, Cellphones, Wireless I'm currently reading Jerry Kaplan's excellent book "Startup: a Silicon Valley adventure". In this book, Kaplan, founder and CEO of GO Corp., details the founding, financing and eventual demise of his highly innovative company, including the development and workings of their product. What's so surprising about this book is just how timeless it really is - the names and products may have changed, but the business practices and company attitudes surely haven't.
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kwan_e
Member since:
2007-02-18

The only reality distortion field around here is the one in the heads of people who think that Apple's success is based on marketing. If one does not recognise that Apple is above all a products company then I fear you may be living in a parallel universe. A universe in which this:

http://www.skylarknetworks.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/ipho...

is a copy of this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Color_sidekick.jpg

Microsoft's advertising budget each year exceeds Apple's. Looking at this chart of the advertising spend by the biggest spenders one can see that Apple's budget is fairly modest.

http://www.marketingdegree.net/top-advertising-spends/


Fail. Intellectual collapse. Pathetic rambling. (I can do it too.)

You really really think advertising budget is all that matters? It's who you market to and how you market it. Apples advertising, while not as costly, is REALLY EFFECTIVE. For you to claim the effectiveness advertising is all about how much money is spent on it is ridiculous. Apple advertisements wins awards. If you think the quality of an advertising campaign (rather than the size and duration) has no appreciable effect on customers, you're living in a land of unicorns.

Furthermore, MARKETING is not just advertising. It is about creating the perceived value, which is mostly about appealing to hipster twats. You can do that without that much advertising. A large part of it can simply be dressing like a hipster twats and you've got those twats' attention.

Reply Parent Score: 1

Tony Swash Member since:
2009-08-22

It is about creating the perceived value, which is mostly about appealing to hipster twats. You can do that without that much advertising. A large part of it can simply be dressing like a hipster twats and you've got those twats' attention.



Are you really arguing that a company that is selling around $185 billion worth of products a year, whose sales have been increasing at a rate of 100% and more per year for several years is doing this by mostly "appealing to hipster twats".

All I can say is given Apple's growth over the last decade there must have been a mysterious and vast increase in the hipster twat population ;)

Reply Parent Score: 2

Yagami Member since:
2006-07-15

no doubt about that ... the more people i talk to the more i realise that this world is lost for.

like it is said : "I dont want to live in this world anymore".

So yeah, although i am not saying that is the case, but yeah, it would be totally possible for being marketting alone.

Reply Parent Score: 1

kwan_e Member since:
2007-02-18

"It is about creating the perceived value, which is mostly about appealing to hipster twats. You can do that without that much advertising. A large part of it can simply be dressing like a hipster twats and you've got those twats' attention.



Are you really arguing that a company that is selling around $185 billion worth of products a year, whose sales have been increasing at a rate of 100% and more per year for several years is doing this by mostly "appealing to hipster twats".

All I can say is given Apple's growth over the last decade there must have been a mysterious and vast increase in the hipster twat population ;) "

Do you know how books and CDs and such make it on to best selling lists?

The publishers actually go out and buy the books. So even though they lose money doing so, they bump up their sales figures. Once it reaches a critical point, the fact that their sales growth figures are so big that they start getting on lists become advertisements in themselves, causing people to buy them just for being on the list. This further accelerates those figures and pulls the figures up even more. It's a well documented marketing practice and phenomenon.

Hipster twats show they are willing to spend more money than is sensible. They do this with clothes, music and computing devices. Look at the iPad ad from the Charlie Brooker rant that I linked to early on and tell me that ad isn't marketed towards hipster twats.

Once they get enough hipster twats buying, the wannabe-hipster-twats see the once overpriced gadget as suddenly worth the money.

This is called a positive feedback loop. Positive feedback loops happen all the time and are responsible for anything that causes acceleration beyond what is normally sustainable. It's even well documented in NATURE and are more commonly referred to as arms races - they are a special case of positive feedback loops. The golden goal of marketing is to create these positive feedback loops.

And yes there actually has been a mysterious increase in the hipster twat population. This is suggested by the increase in the number of shitty commercial music acts and the increase in sales for these shitty commercial music acts and their product advertising. It shows that more people are willing to spend more than is sensible for ordinary mass marketed products. An increase in the hipster twat population increases the population of wannabe-hipster twats also and that is a non-linear correlation.

It's saddening to see how many supposedly intelligent people really can't understand that they're being heavily psychological influenced. In Australia, there was a show called The Gruen Transfer which got marketing types together to explain all the tricks that marketers use to influence sales. You'd be surprised at how well subtle marketing works into making people believe they're making their own choices and not just doing the marketer's bidding. That, in turn, gets people defending their choices as well thought out, not understanding that's what the marketers aim for and have succeeded in doing.

The greatest trick marketing ever pulled was to convince gadget nerds that marketing doesn't exist. I think that's how that quote goes...

Reply Parent Score: 2

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