All backed by ongoing support to give you much-needed peace of mind. Our Business Team is here to help you find the best ways for you and your people to work together. Explore AppleCare and Apple Support — including the Genius Bar — anytime your business needs help with getting set up, hardware repairs, software support, or troubleshooting.
For more specialized help, connect with a certified Apple Consultant. Many offer onsite or virtual IT support, expertise in your industry, and custom tech solutions. Our products are built to last, making them a great investment. And when you shop for your own business, you can get even more benefits. Create an account now and get access to a dedicated store, where you can qualify for special pricing.
Our team can also help you find financing options and trade in eligible devices for credit on your next purchase. Small Business. Shop now shop now. Additionally, Apple has focused on innovation beyond the core by creating the infrastructure to enable this ecosystem in a secure and seamless fashion think Apple Pay secure payments or biometric facial recognition on the iPhone X.
The most tangible example, of course, is in Apple stores. When an app in the AppStore is misbehaving, Apple has to take responsibility and act quickly to resolve the issue. Foster a Community of Evangelists. However, as its products have become more ubiquitous, Apple has had to work harder to maintain that focus.
For students, artists, and entrepreneurs, Apple has sought to build community and bring more customers into the fold. Currently, Apple offers youth programs, such as free classes for children learning to code, to capture the imaginations of future consumers. Pitfalls: Any firm that wants to have a community of evangelists must take that community seriously. It has to invest in their care and feeding, but most importantly, it has to listen to them and act proactively.
A community of evangelists who feel like their input is ignored can quickly move from being a huge marketing asset to a catastrophic liability. Organize Sales and Marketing by Customer, not Product. For the diverse SME and enterprise segments, the company organizes its sales teams based on the industry served, not products sold. Salespeople work on teams that focus on different types of customers. For example, a former biomedical engineer with experience working in hospitals might be assigned to small-to-medium sized accounts in healthcare, while a sales rep with a financial services background might be assigned to work on a team selling comprehensive solutions to banks and credit unions.
The benefit of this approach is that it ensures the salesperson really understands the customer and can offer solutions from across the Apple portfolio to best meet customer needs. In the same vein, Apple hires sales reps for its retail stores from all walks of life. In this way, they can embody every type of person that walks into an Apple store and thus connect more genuinely.
Many companies have cyclical reorganizations of their sales and marketing teams that shift from product-centric to customer-centric to region-centric, and back again. Apple manages this challenge by keeping its structure focused on customers, but the structure is informal and there are no separate divisions for different industries. Keeping sales or marketing from splitting into warring silos requires constant vigilance.
Control Pricing. While many other technology retailers might use discounting to drive demand, Apple focuses less on acquiring new customers through price and, instead, by making them loyal to Apple products by offering an outstanding customer experience. Pitfalls: Apple has lived through the pitfalls of different pricing strategies. Pricing control is a double-edged sword that requires on-going investment to justify the prices.
Use Customer-based Metrics. At most stores, the salesperson works tirelessly to up-sell, cross-sell, any-kind-of-sell, often leaving customers confused and frustrated. Apple manages nearly all retail locations and its staff using NPS scores. NPS feedback is collected and shared with store teams daily—all negative feedback is addressed within 24 hours with a personal call from a store manager. NPS is also used to guide decisions ranging across employee promotions to long-term strategy.
Apple has never fallen prey to this practice and instead continues to build value from quality rather than from price. Unpack Simplicity. Apple has mastered the art of minimalism—where product aesthetics, user interfaces, the brand logo, support functions, and even advertising are stripped down to the fundamentals.
Products have simple, clean lines, with even simpler, self-explanatory names. However, it has turned down co-marketing efforts such as Intel stickers on its machines that every other major competitor participates in with those same suppliers. Generating customer value means building a business model that ensures this value is created repeatedly. Hiring customer-obsessed employees and opening retail stores are a big part of creating value for Apple customers.
However, iTunes should also be viewed as an integral part of the business model. Good marketing requires a willingness to cannibalize your offerings if you have a superior option to bring to market. Apple has done this at this least twice. First, Apple dropped its most popular iPod, the Mini, when it introduced the Nano.
Second, although offering unique features, the iPhone is a potential threat to independent iPod sales because both play music. Many organizations might have been afraid to build a product that would detract from its most popular product.
Many companies fail by being unwilling to make tough decisions about which customers to seek and products to offer. Apple, on the other hand, made these tough decisions and adopted a strategy that focused on a limited number of product lines and limited offerings within each line. This strategy holds today. The result is that customers know what to expect from Apple and they usually get it. The introduction of the iPhone was coupled with building an online App Store.
However, the App Store only works if there are companies willing to develop for the platform and integrate iOS apps into their strategies going forward. Apple created development tools that promote a simple, consistent experience for developers on the iOS platform. This helps to speed up app development and deepen user engagement, a win-win-win for developers, customers and, of course, Apple.
With over , apps available and over 24 billion apps downloaded to date, apps have not only helped increase switching costs for iPhone and iPad users, but have also proved to be a lucrative revenue stream.
After five CMO Survey Awards for Marketing Excellence, Apple has shown that it is not only an outstanding technology company but also an outstanding marketer. However, at the core, Apple has figured out how to attract and retain customers, to generate an enormous amount of word of mouth and brand appeal, and to build a business model, channel structure, and moat that give it a powerful competitive advantage.
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