JG etc.

From Wikipedia: “In marketing, a halo effect is one where the perceived positive features of a particular item extend to a broader brand. It has been used to describe how the iPod has had positive effects on perceptions of Apple Computer’s other products.”

About a month ago I wrote a post entitled the “Apple’s Halo Effect and the Faux Genius of Apple Marketing” that started to get so long that I could never finish it. The gist of it was that with the iPod having such a huge share of the MP3 market, why couldn’t Apple transition that into Mac sales? The iPod has the same sort of features as the Mac and both are priced comparably high in their respected industries.

Everyone loves Apple marketing, but let’s face it, the people in Seattle are much better at doing one thing, pushing product.

Today Apple came out with some new ads. I really do like them, but they suffer from the same critical Apple marketing flaws.

-Suits buy PCs, kids and liberals buy Macs.

-Completely condescending. You have to be an idiot to own a PC! While true, it hasn’t worked in mass adoption for the past 30 years, and it is not going to start now.

-Why, why, why, always show the iMac, never a picture of the MacBook Pro. Who buys a desktop anymore?

-No integration of the iPod with the Mac. People love their iPods, someone loved mine so much they broke my car window to get it. Now I’m sad, why? Because I love my iPod, the only thing worse would be losing my MacBook Pro. But most peole don’t have to worry about losing their MacBook Pro, why? Because they don’t have one. A recent Forrester survey had a couple of findings in the report that may be worrisome. One finding is that Apple’s brand recognition fails to encompass the iPod.

“The Apple brand adoption data looks wrong — after all, the company has sold 42 million iPods, far more than the 5.2 million households that claim to use the Apple brand regularly — until you realize that ‘Apple Computer’ is not the same brand as ‘iPod,’ the Forrester report said.

How about an Apple commercial with the iPod and the Mac side by side, and nothing else? Just 30 seconds of fantastic human engineering and no noise.

A great point in the comments in Om Malik’s post in reference to the Apple’s suprising server growth.

Apple’s problem from the inception of the Macintosh is that is has never been able to market their products successfully. EVERYONE that takes the time to examine Apple’s hardware and software offerings acknowledges that Apple’s products are superior in almost every way to competitors products: from overall quality; to ease of use; to overall cost of ownership. Yet, ask the common man their opinion or survey that opinion based upon marketshare and Apple falls woefully short. When one compares Apple’s OS offerings vs Microsoft’s OS - it’s not even a competition with Apple winning hands down on all points except one. Microsoft is KING at getting people to buy their products despite their products’ failings. Apple struggles to sell to anyone not already converted.