Apple Breaks More Records with the iPhone 4S
October 18, 2011
Apple continues to sell more iPhones, break its own records, and surpass expectations with the launch of the iPhone 4S on October 14th.
When the iPhone 4 launched, 600,000 units were pre-ordered within the first 24 hours. The iPhone 4S beat that by nearly 67%!
When the iPhone 4 launched on June 24, 2010, 1.7 million units were sold within the first three days that it was available. The iPhone 4S beat that by over 135%!
Here are the statistics for the iPhone 4S to date from Reuters:
- 1 million iPhone 4S units were pre-ordered within the first 24 hours of its availability.
- In the first 3 days that the iPhone 4S has been on the market, 4 million units have been sold.
- During those first three days, the iPhone 4S was available in 7 countries — the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Canada. The iPhone 4 was only available in 5 countries in its first 3 days on the market.
- The iPhone 4S was available through the 3 primary wireless carriers in the United States (Verizon Wireless, AT&T Wireless, and Sprint) at launch. The iPhone 4 was only available through AT&T Wireless when it launched.
- Analysts predict that the iPhone 4S will hit 25 to 30 million units sold within its first 3 months of its availability. It will be available in a total of 29 countries by October 28th and over 70 countries before the year ends.
There is no doubt that Apple does at great job with tease marketing and building a demand for its new products by tapping into consumers’ emotions and baiting them with new features that consumers “need” to live better and be cooler. Consumers who are buying the iPhone 4S quickly cite several new features that had them lining up at the doors to their local Apple stores to get their hands on the latest and greatest smartphone:
- Siri voice command
- AirPlay wireless mirroring
- Higher megapixel camera
- IOS 5
- 4G network
- 2 antennas
- Speed — faster processor, faster camera, and more
The exterior of the iPhone 4S doesn’t look very different from the iPhone 4, and there are still negative aspects of the iPhone that haven’t been addressed (e.g., the battery life is better than the iPhone 4, but not much). However, consumers cannot wait to get their hands on the latest and greatest Apple product.
With each new version of its products, Apple adds just enough new features and improvements to make them the hot new gadget to own, and the marketing push behind product launches is genius. Apple updates its products approximately once per year (or less), so there is always a great deal of anticipation around a launch. Again, Apple is the company to benchmark when it comes to emotional branding, relationship branding, and tease marketing. Whether you’re an Apple customer or not, if you’re a marketer or branding professional, you need to study Apple and learn how to leave consumers always wanting more from your brand.
Image: Flickr
Brands Spread the Love for Valentine’s Day Promotions
February 15, 2011
This year, brands are looking for new ways to connect with consumers and drive sales with unique Valentine’s Day promotions. Many of these new marketing initiatives leverage social media as one would expect in 2011.
AT&T is a brand that stands out from the crowd this year in terms of launching modern and unique Valentine’s Day promotions. AT&T put together a campaign called Shout Your Love from the Mountaintop that debuted just four days before the February 14th holiday. The tagline for the promotion was, “when you love someone, you want to tell the world. You want to shout it from the mountaintop.”
Customers were asked to share their messages of love on the AT&T Facebook page (shown above) and beginning at 8:00 a.m. (PST) on Valentine’s Day and ending in the evening the same day, “fully qualified Mountain Men yellers” read those messages of love on HTC Inspire 4G phones and shouted them for the world to hear. The shouting aired on a live webcast and the submitted messages and Mountain Men videos appear on the AT&T Shout Your Love from the Mountaintop Facebook app (shown below) and on the Share AT&T YouTube channel.
Within the short four days of the campaign, nearly 10,000 people submitted messages of love. Three days before Valentine’s Day, AT&T added a Twitter element to the campaign by asking users to use the Twitter hashtag #LoveShout to spread the word, and AT&T invested in Twitter promotion so the hashtag would be listed in the top trending topics. To round out the online marketing promotion, banner ads and video ads were placed on a variety of top websites such as AOL and Yahoo!
I’m not sure if this campaign drove the ROI AT&T was hoping for, but it undoubtedly drove a positive brand buzz. What do you think of this creative Valentine’s Day promotion by AT&T? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.
Creative Ambient Media for Local Retailer Works
August 19, 2010
When Romtelecom (the largest telecommunications company in Romania) needed to tell local customers that one of its brick-and-mortar stores moved to a new location, they turned to Graffiti BBDO out of Bucharest, Romania to help them spread the word. The creative team at Graffiti BBDO decided to make use of a nearby intersection to not just spread the word locally but also cause an online conversation that gave the business a boost from all directions.
Check out the video below which tells the creative story and shows how this clever bit of ambient media grabbed the attention of people on the street and around the world.
The goal for Romtelecom was simply to ensure the local store didn’t lose business after its move, but this creative ambient media got people talking about the brand. In other words, it achieved far more than its original objective by creating a conversation and word-of-mouth marketing that reached a larger audience via the social web and brought the brand in front of more people than a few signs and local ads ever could achieve on their own.
What do you think? Are you (or should I say, is your leadership) brave enough to use creative ambient media like Romtelecom? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.
What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 11: Make Your Interim Financial Results Easily Accessible
February 1, 2010
If the heart of understanding a company is the ability to parse the financial statements, then the lifeblood of the company is the data flow about current results. The smooth and orderly flow of information from the company to investors should be a given, yet it is surprising how often one has to hunt for all of the relevant information. The press release will be in one spot, the conference call replay another and governmental filings yet another.
A good practice for investor web sites is to have a page where everything concerning the most recent results is in a single spot. Because different web sites choose to label information differently, this avoids investor frustration as they try to track down all the pieces of financial information they may want.
One site that does a good job of this is BT, the telecommunications company. As can be seen in the screenshot on the right, their Results & Presentations page gives investors access to the news release, webcast, slides and KPIs (Key Performance indicators) all in one spot.
A couple of things set this page apart: first, not only can you view the webcast, but you can also download a transcript. Although transcripts do not give investors some of the flavor of management’s approach to the results, they can be reviewed more quickly than the process of viewing an entire hour’s worth of presentations. Second, transcripts are searchable for key phrases, so if in following a company you are particularly concerned with headcount or product returns or customer satisfaction levels, you can quickly search the transcript to see if the issues were addressed, again without sitting through the entire presentation.
Another site that does a good job of consolidating information about interim reports is Marks and Spencer. The approach is slightly different, grouping the information by year, but the type of information is clearly labeled and easy to find. Of note on the M&S site are video interviews with the chairman and the Group Finance and Operations director, providing additional color on the interim results.
These are good examples of web design that thinks in terms of “What does the investor need to know?’ rather than “What do we have to disclose?”
In this series:
Previous post: Provide graphs
Next post: Debt information
Mobile Apps are Hot – Does Your Brand Have One?
January 22, 2010
A recent study by DM2PRO and Quattro Wireless reports that mobile apps are going to skyrocket in popularity in 2010, so while less than 50% of companies surveyed for the study invested in mobile apps in 2009, the majority plan to do so in 2010. That’s a significant shift in investment strategy.
Most companies surveyed in the study claimed that they invest in mobile apps to increase customer engagement, connect with targeted audiences, expand their marketing reach, and keeping their brands in front of consumers.
Where are all those dollars being invested? Check out the chart from eMarketer below to get an idea of where marketers in North America used mobile/social apps in 2009 to get an idea.
Facebook and iPhone apps clearly lead the pack in terms of where investments in branded apps are channeled, and I don’t suspect that will shift much in 2010. However, it’s expected that more companies will invest in mobile apps than social media apps in 2010.
What is particularly interesting in this trend is the fact that there is more standardization in apps today, so investment costs are actually decreasing in many ways. Hopefully, that will lead to more advancements in terms of capabilities and functionality. ‘Plain Jane’ apps could be usurped very quickly as the world of mobile apps morphs before our eyes.
This is a fast paced environment, and the truth of the matter is that many brands may have trouble keeping up and staying relevant, particularly brands backed by large companies that have to wade through corporate bureaucracy to make decisions and move to action. This could actually be a good thing for consumers though, as smaller companies that can move faster jump in and seize opportunities, but will those smaller companies stand a chance in the long run? Or will we have a fast rise and faster plunge similar to the dotcom bust in the 1990s?
Regardless, it’s an exciting time to be a marketer! Does your brand have an app yet?
Get our updates
 |