250. Apple Marketing Strategy: Why Apple's Strategy Works so Well
Apple's marketing strategy has always been a standout, turning technology into lifestyle essentials. The iPhone isn't just a gadget; it's a hub for apps, media, payments, and even health. In this episode we talk about how Apple achieves this, weaving its intelligent product designs with top-notch copywriting. Through a conversation snippet with David Meerman Scott, we explore Apple's deep understanding of its customers and how small businesses can adapt these ideas. Stick around to the end for practical tips on implementing these strategies in your own business.
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Timestamp:
00:00 Introduction to Apple's Marketing Strategy
00:21 Apple's Multi-Layered Product Approach
00:56 The M Series Chips and AI Integration
01:29 Apple's Historical Innovations
02:00 Apple's AI and Privacy Strategy
02:11 The Evolution of Apple's Ecosystem
03:52 Apple's Proprietary Approach
07:08 The Vision Pro and Future Prospects
07:54 David Meerman Scott's Insights
08:36 Implementing Apple's Strategy in Your Business
11:51 Conclusion and Next Steps
Ash Roy's and David Meerman Scott Video Transcript (This transcript has been auto-generated. Artificial Intelligence is still in the process of perfecting itself. There may be some errors in transcription):
Ash Roy:
Apple's marketing strategy is remarkable to me. This iPhone is not just a product, it's a distribution channel for their apps, for their media. It's also a part of their payment infrastructure, which is becoming a part of our day-to-day life. We transact on this device. So is this Apple Watch. It's also a health monitoring device.
In this video, we explore Apple's marketing strategies and it's very intelligent, multi layered product approach combined with great skill in copywriting, which comes from a deep understanding of their ideal customers and the problems those customers face. And that's something I discussed with David Meerman Scott in this snippet of a conversation we recently had.
If you'd like to learn how to do this as a small business owner and implement these ideas into your own business, be sure to stick around until the end where I'll share some ideas around how I've been implementing this in my business and how you might want to consider doing the same.
When Apple came out with the M series chips, I thought it was just a case of vertical integration where they decided to take over the manufacturing of the chips from Intel to minimize the cost.
Disruptions are to maximize control over the entire manufacturing process. But later I discovered that these M series chips have neural networks on them, which has become a core part of their artificial intelligence proposition, which is AI on device with a privacy first approach, which to my knowledge, no other company can currently offer.
When Apple came out with the iPod, they deeply understood their customers and that led to the idea of a thousand songs in your pocket, which was a transformative piece of copy. Now I might have credited Steve Jobs with coming up with this copy and I don't know that for a fact, so I apologize if that's incorrect, but that's what I discuss.
Among other things with David Meehan and Scott in this conversation. And this conversation is a snippet from the entire discussion, which you can access at productiveInsights.com/membership. Let's do this.
I'm very impressed with the way Apple has played the AI game. And. In the most recent announcement and here's my take on it.
I'd love to get your thoughts on it. So, Apple has done this a few times when this first came out, I thought it was a product, but then it turns out that this is not just a product. It's a distribution channel for their apps, for their media, which they're doubling down on and so on and so forth. It's also a payment processor.
Who knows what else they're going to turn it into, but their product releases are multi layered, which is very interesting to me. Now they kind of hijacked or news jacked the, the term, AI by calling it Apple intelligence, which I thought was a bit cheeky, but it seems to be catching on now. But what was more interesting to me is there was all this speculation before iOS 18 was announced.
Is Apple going to partner with Gemini? Is Apple going to partner with OpenAI and so on? And now it turns out that they've created this thing called private cloud. They've been flying the privacy flag forever. They've also been creating What they call efficient language models or small language models, which are going to work on the device, on device, on the chip, faster response times, and so on.
And then if they have to send questions to what they call the private cloud, they have turned Chat GPT, potentially Gemini and Meta, all into utilities that plugging into this thing. And so, they've kind of turned the tables in a sense, and they've turned these, these frontline players into providers by creating this ecosystem and they're folding them into the ecosystem.
I thought that was a very cheeky, but interesting strategy of just taking over the space from as usual, from not being the first mover. What are your thoughts on that?
David Meerman Scott:
Well, yes. Um, they, they are rarely the first mover, but when they do come out with something, um, it tends to be, very proprietary.
Remember back to, I want to say probably around 2004 ish. I don't know to 20 years ago, I don't know the exact timing, but there are a whole bunch of technology companies coming out with MP3 players and they were really, really, really hard to use. And I had, I had one and man, it was hard to use. And then all of a sudden, the iPod comes out together with iTunes.
It was an ecosystem and you know, it's successor now, Apple music together with my iPhone is how I listened to music, you know, it's proprietary. I think that the way that Apple is approaching AI, and by the way, Siri is AI, and I think Siri is. Siri, it seems like is going to be their primary interface to their AI.
So, in other words, it's voice command. Um, and that's super interesting in itself because the other services, at least initially, were primarily text interfaces. I find it fascinating that Apple comes out, comes out of the gate with something that's, that's really interesting. That at least on the surface appears to be primarily voice activated, but yeah, I think always when, when it comes to Apple, we want to look at what are they doing because they're, they just love this idea of being proprietary and it's, it's their ecosystem and they control it.
And I suspect that's what, what's going to continue to happen. And I think this idea of experience that you mentioned is, absolutely spot on correct and one of the things that I've constantly do in my blog posts that I constantly do in my books is examples of success. It's one thing to say, here's how you should do this kind of marketing.
It's another thing to say, here's an example. Of someone who did it, that's been successful and that's hard to recreate. And that's, I believe, as you said correctly, in my mind, um, how you can break through when everyone's just using this recycled DREC.
Ash Roy:
One thing I think that Steve Jobs did, which put Apple on the map was his copywriting, because you remember when he came out with the iPod, he came up with a line that really landed for me.
And that was a thousand songs in your pocket. You remember when they were advertising all the MP3 players that were talking about megabits of space, who, what does that mean? I'm a music lover. I don't care about megabits of space, how many songs. And that thing said a thousand songs and it personalized by saying in my pocket.
And I thought that was amazing. The other. Very interesting copy, piece of copy he came up with, because at the time people would listen to Discman's and they would bounce when you would walk or they would trip, I should say. And the other one he came up with, which sounded a bit lame, but it worked. It was No More Moving Parts.
I don't know if you remember that.
David Meerman Scott:
I don't remember that one. A Thousand Songs in Your Pocket. Yeah, I absolutely remember that one. And it's also, it's super simple. And if you look at, um, their stores, if you look at their website, the design is super clean. The design of the products is super clean. The interfaces are clean.
Um, you know, they have focused very much on a particular aesthetic. Yeah.
Ash Roy:
And you know, the Vision Pro has just come out today in Australia. I know it's been released in the U. S. a long time ago. I'm very interested to see that they've coined another phrase using your analogy earlier on, they're calling it spatial computing.
So, the thing is that the execution is pretty good. I mean, I don't think that Vision Pro is accessible to most people. It's obnoxiously expensive here in Australia. It's $6, 000, three and a half grand in the US.
Oh, wow.
Ash Roy:
It is quite remarkable the experience that it delivers. And I think the next version is probably going to be that much more commercial.
David Meerman Scott:
I agree with that. I didn't buy one. I was pretty critical of it when it first came out. But, um, hey, the next version or two or three versions from now, I, think we want, we need to be watching what they're doing.
Ash Roy:
How can our listeners learn more about you, David, and Uh, when does your book come out so they can get themselves a copy?
David Meerman Scott:
The New Rules of Marketing and PR, the ninth edition of the book, completely revised, updated, new stories, big chapter on artificial intelligence, comes out in mid-August, 2024, uh, available. Practically anywhere. So, uh, do take a look at that. Um, my full name is David Meerman Scott. So, and you will find me because I am the only David Meerman Scott in the entire planet.
Ash Roy: Thank you so much for being on the podcast, David. And maybe we'll talk
again soon.
David Meerman Scott:
That'd be fun, Ash. Thanks a lot. Talk soon.
Ash Roy:
Okay, earlier in this video, I said that I would share how I'm implementing this multilayered strategy that Apple uses in our business and how you might want to consider doing the same thing here on our website, and I'll show you how to download this in a minute.
You can get access to a nine-step repeatable business growth framework, and this is a tool you could actually download. Download, no opt in required. You can print it out and they can have it. Sitting there next to their computer and on the face of it, it's a useful tool. However, it is also a multi layered offering because if you look closely at this document in the middle here, it says, click here to download your free nine step business growth email course.
Now, just imagine if you are somebody who's interested in downloading the course, as opposed to just being able to look at this document, then you might want to click on this. And that takes you to our productiveinsights.com/subscribe page, where you can enter in your email address. And as long as you click these two buttons and you click on the subscribe button, it sends the course off to you.
So, the big idea here is if I decided to share this with a friend and they didn't want to give me their email address, they still get the PDF, which is useful. However, they might share it with 10 other friends. And the 10th friend might say, you know what, I do want to check out the course. So, they click on this thing, and like I just showed you, they decide to get the course, for which they do need to give us their email address.
But they may have got this PDF without having provided an email address, and it may have jumped 10 hosts, as it were. This tool has virality built into it, but this thing can scale infinitely. The other interesting thing about this tool is see these things here where it says, click me. Each of these nine steps is clickable.
And if you were to click on, say the second step where it says, research your market, create an empathy map for your ideal customer persona. You might click on that and it takes you to my conversation. With my friend Seth Godin, which then you can read through the whole show notes, you can watch my conversation.
Let's get straight into it. So, in your book, Seth, this is marketing. You said something that really, that's me chatting to Seth on our YouTube video. So, it's sending traffic to our YouTube video. If we want, we could have a pop up on this page. That way we can choose to make other offers to people as pop ups, or maybe someone lands on the page and they get the opportunity to opt-in.
So, this 9-step framework has virality built into it because you could share it with 100 people and only 5 or 10 of those 100 people decide that they want to give us the email address in exchange for which they get the course. But if they decide they just want the PDF, they get it without giving us an email address.
And the other thing is that it allows you to click on any of these things. And that links back to a particular podcast episode where you can go deeper into that particular topic. So hopefully you find this useful and you might be able to do something similar in your business. Let me know in the comments, what do you think of this?
I also teach how to do this in the membership program, which you can check out at ProductiveInsights.com/membership. If you did like this video, I highly recommend checking out this video, which talks about the five mistakes I've made in business and the solution to those mistakes. So hopefully you can learn from my mistakes and you don't have to make them yourself.
Thanks for listening and watching. Ciao for now, and I'll see you in the next video.
