You have to love marketing in the Twitter age. It’s almost mind blowing in its capacity for mass hypnosis.
You might have heard about the new phone from Apple, the iPhone 5s. You might also have heard that there is a ‘gold’ version – the iPhone 5s Gold. Now a reasonable person hearing this would think that there is no way a company could sell an iPhone effectively if it had any amount of gold in or on it. And you would be right! In actual fact, the gold iPhone is just a finish color; it’s been also called ‘champagne’ color. In fact on Apple’s site, there is zero mention of the term ‘gold’ – no doubt as a result of effective lawyers doing their job to avoid any liability or false advertising claims. Even with that, the entire page color for the iPhone 5s is a gold hue; wink wink, nod, nod.
By both pre-announcing they would have a ‘gold’ color and making sure that finish was much scarcer than the space grey color alternative, Apple smartly created a surprise phenomenon; a phenomenon it continues to sustain without actually using any words to that effect. Customers now routinely refer to that variant of the iPhone as ‘gold’. Do a news search for iPhone 5s ‘gold’ and ‘champagne’ and see the results – no pickup on champagne and a ton on gold.
Competitors have started to offer the same color scheme for their own phones – both HTC and Samsung have jumped on the bandwagon. The irony for these follow on acts is that while Apple had a pretty deft and light touch in creating the marketing effect, both HTC and Samsung will have to be comparatively heavy handed in order to create the same effect – perhaps opening them up to a greater risk of litigation.
There are some morals to this story:
- Apple is good at marketing. It’s not a fluke, it’s a competitive advantage they have sustained over multiple business cycles. Somewhere the product manager for the brown Zune is wincing. The corollary is that Microsoft is average to bad at marketing. Google is like a savant – when they care, they can be good. But most times they don’t care.
- The Tech media and the media at large is lazy. How easy is it not to use the marketing speak from a company when it doesn’t make sense? How easy is it to be a counterbalancing force? How easy is it to be factual and ameliorate mass hypnosis? Bah.
- The intangibles in a product can be as important as the tangibles. That’s saying a mouthful. Do with it what you will if you have a product that needs to find a market.
- The world is smaller than it was 5 years ago. You can use marketing remarkably effectively if you really understand how the different mediums work best.
