Apple Computer just announced that their earnings from
the last quarter more than quadrupled mainly due to
robust holiday sales of the iPod digital music player.
More than 10 million iPods have been sold since it was
introduced in 2001.
There are some important marketing lessons to be learned
from all this. First of all, Apple has created a product
for a hungry market that has the financial means to
purchase it even with the relatively high price point.
If you find a hot and hungry market, create a product for
it and you are almost guaranteed to succeed.
Lesson #1: Find a hot and hungry market
Ever since the introduction of the MP3 file format, we
have seen the popularity of converting songs from a CD
so that they can be stored on the computer. Even the
Napster episode showed us that there is a huge market
for a device like the iPod.
Here's the summary of the first lesson - don't sell
shovels to fishermen and fishing poles to gold miners.
Rather, sell the shovels to gold miners and the fishing
poles to fishermen. Create a product that already has
an existing market.
Lesson #2: Create different versions
Now Apple just announced the introduction of the iPod
Shuffle - a lower-priced version of the iPod with
flash memory instead of hard drive storage.
This strategy is called versioning.
First create a product that sells. Then create another
version of the product for a different market segment.
In this case, Apple first came up with a more expensive
product and followed it up with a cheaper product.
Lesson #3: Create the halo effect
The halo effect is essentially this: increasing sales
of one popular product will generate more sales for your
other existing products. In this case, the tremendous
popularity of the iPod has created enough buzz that
more people are buying Macs.
In the past, Macs have made inroads only to a small
segment of the market. But now, we're likely to see
Apple increase its market share of personal computers
in the months to come.
So whatever you are selling, there are definitely some
general marketing lessons to be learned from the success
of the iPod. Think about it the next time you use your
iPod.
Hock Ng is the editor of
The Marketing Tools Review,
an online newsletter highlighting the latest marketing
tools and strategies, especially for internet marketers.
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http://www.marketing-tools-review.com
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