How to buy all the marketing you need for $100
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Apple on
HP must be quietly fuming. The day after its huge launch - five iPAQs, three new business desktops, two new small business notebooks, solid start drives in five ultraportables plus a slew of home machines, including the impressive Blackbird 002 from the Voodoo division - the team at HP must have been hoping for some good coverage in the US papers. The Wall Street Journal did give Blackbird a good writeup - but all the columns where you might have expected to see a discussion of the MediaSmart TVs or the Windows Home Server or the first mainstream portables with solid state drives were filled with the news that Apple had upset existing customers by cutting the iPhone price.
Apple is news. It’s hip, it’s exciting, it’s controversial. And Steve Jobs knows exactly how to get the most press coverage. Asked about customers who’d just paid twice the price for the iPhone he suggested they try their luck asking for a refund from the store. And if they didn’t have any luck? “That’s technology,” he said. Actually it’s typical Apple.
By the evening of the next day Apple was getting even more coverage, making the evening news with a $100 refund for all iPhone owners. If the company really had sold the million iPhones it predicted but couldn’t prove, that’s a hundred million dollars - expensive free publicity, but it keeps the buzz going. I’d expect it to be half that, which is cheap for that kind of exposure.
Apart from the price cut, Apple didn’t have a lot that was new, apart from a version of the iPhone with no phone or camera. If you want to get some work done on the move, HP has the first 3G QWERTY GPS smartphone, which could give RIM a run for it’s money, along with a 4″ Wi-Fi PDA that could be the enterprise equivalent of the Nokia 770 tablet but running the apps you actually use in the enterprise. And those solid state drives; you’ll have to have £500 burning a hole in your pocket just for the drive - and you still have to pay for the notebook, but this marks the start of a real market in serious flash storage. 64GB is still smaller than anyone really wants, but it’s just enough to pay attention to. HP is buying from both Sandisk and Samsung, which means the drives are replacements for a standard hard drive, not proprietary components. And they’re going into notebooks you could do some real work on, unlike Sony’s delightful but niche micro PC.
Whether you measure it by size, revenue, profits, range of products or innovations HP ought to be beating Apple into a cocked hat. But it’s still Apple that has the buzz.
HP’s TV ads emphasis not the products but what the HP achievers - from Princess Fiona to Serena Williams - are doing with them. That’s what matters - but it’s also a marketing tack Apple took ten years back with the Apple Masters - I remember Bryan Adams and Douglas Adams showing off their Mac habit. Satjiv Chahil worked on marketing at Apple before moving to HP and he’s helped revolutionise the image of what used to be a rather worthy industry leader. Apple has switched to showing off industrial design, desirability and how cool its products make you look. And look which of them we’re all talking about.
Are looks everything? Take tablet PCs - I’m travelling with the gorgeous Toshiba R400, all glossy white and good looks, but also a powerful and flexible tablet. Guess which feature draws the compliments?
HP is adding the solid state drive and a sliver-thin battery to its 2710p tablet - I had to think three times to remember the name after talking about it all day and that says something - deliverying10 hours of battery life in something lighter than the R400. The screen is exactly the same size - 12.1″ widescreen - but a superslim bezel makes it look smaller. It has more ports than the R400 - and they bulk large all over the edges. Put the two of them side by side and the R400 looks Apple stylish; the 271p looks like a geek system that needs to go through one more design rev to bring out its inner beauty.
The R400 has the same viscerable desirability as the iPhone or the Blackberry Pearl. That tells you nothing about which is the better machine or whether the 2710p finally delivers a replacement for the beloved TC1000 and TC1100 where HP pioneered the tablet category. But it does tell you that Apple has succeeded in making us think good technology is only skin deep.
-Mary leaving New York for Seattle
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