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Apple's Core Problem: Making Consumers Crave an iPad

Apple is faced with a new marketing challenge with the iPad. It's trying to define a new category, and it's not yet clear whether the company has homed in on the message to consumers. If Apple fails to execute the iPad's introduction properly, said University of Washington marketing professor Marcus Cunha Jr., "it may be challenging to make it mainstream."
All of this information came out in a company press release Friday, along with the obligatory Steve Jobs quote saying something about consumers being able to "connect with the apps and content in a more intimate, intuitive and fun way than ever before."
What we don't know: How will Apple sell that ability to connect in an intimate/intuitive/fun way? Will the commercials successfully reflect that innovation? Unlike the Mac, iPod and iPhone, Apple is creating a new device category in the minds of consumers. So will we see the usual Chiat/Day elegance with disembodied hands demonstrating the iPad's functions against a white background with a alternative music/new-agey soundtrack? Can Apple rely on the same legendary marketing prowess that boosted its position in the personal computer, digital media player and smartphone categories?

"There certainly is a risk," said Ben Bajarin, director of consumer technologies at Creative Strategies. "It is a new and emerging category that they are in essence trying to redefine, much like they did with the mobile phone. That will weigh in on how they market it and communicate it."
To that end, perhaps consumers will see a slightly softer campaign than previous Apple products -- let the iPad take advantage of high foot-traffic in Apple Stores for the next six to eight months, with the real target being the Christmas selling season.
"I don't think you're going to see a lot of aggressive marketing off the bat," Bajarin told MacNewsWorld. "They're going to let it get into the market, get people talking about it, let that drive momentum, and then maybe during the holidays, you'll see Apple-esque, iPhone-like commercials."

Selling the iPad Drama A video that purports to be the first iPad commercial is making the rounds on tech news blogs and Web sites. It may indeed be a legitimate, leaked commercial -- or it could be a user mashup that incorporates video from the recent iPad launch event in San Francisco. Whatever the case, the video's producers are big fans of the band Golden State's song "Let It Touch You," which plays as hands manipulate digital photos on an iPad, cue up the movie "Up" in landscape mode and flip through a Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Map, all performed via finger swipes and pinch-and-zooms.
Commercials playing up Apple's new iBook Store will hit the airwaves March 15, Examiner.com's Darryl Deino said his sources told him.
I described the video to Rick Chapman, publisher/managing editor of Softletter and author of In Search of Stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters.
"That's so 2008," he laughed. "That was cool in 'Minority Report,' and then the iPhone made it really cool, but that's not so cool anymore."
Chapman, who is still peeved that Apple didn't include phone capabilities in the iPad, thought the company's marketing strategy was going to revolve around a fully converged device that would represent the future of mobile computing.
"Starting with a computing platform a la netbook, with a killer e-book capability, then integrating that with a phone? You truly would have had Mr. Spock's tricorder, only much cooler than back in 1966," Chapman told MacNews World. "But they didn't want to make it a competitor to their smartphones, so they stripped out the thing that really would have made this cool."
So how to sell the iPad to skeptical first adopters?
"I would position it as a fabulous e-book system, and you can get away with slipping in a not-bad computing system. When you're on the plane, you only need two devices," noted Chapman. "The ad that would have blown me away? Show a guy reading 'War and Peace' on his iPad and then have this super-neat little phone slip out of a dock or something, or a cool earpiece, and then show a picture of some kind of business thing being done."

The High-Stakes iPad Gamble Consumers who face iPad-style innovation tend to place the product among categories already established in their memories, said Marcus Cunha Jr., an associate professor of marketing at the University of Washington's Foster School of Business.
"TiVo had a hard time in the late '90s when people were calling it a 'super VCR' and it sold for about (US)$1,000," Cunha told MacNewsWorld. "If Apple does not execute the introduction of the iPad properly by establishing this new category in consumers' minds, the iPad may have a weak position relative to other products established in current categories. Die-hard Apple fans will still buy it, but it may be challenging to make it mainstream."
What if the initial ads for the iPad played up books, newspapers, magazines and other media?
"One way they can deal with this situation is by positioning the iPad as an electronic media delivery device. Instead of subscribing to magazines, people would receive content from magazines, newspapers and even TV on their iPads," Cunha said.
That means along with the well-manicured fingers moving across an iPad in those TV spots, there had better be some A-list content partners shown on those iPad screens, said Neal Burns, a former ad agency executive who is now a professor at the Texas Advertising & Public Relations.
"One of the things they may do to help gather the cult audience whose behavior is appropriate for this new device is to form some very critical partnerships," said Burns. "Then I think this thing begins to have meaning beyond the latest Mac hype."
His best example of that kind of content deal? The New York Review of Books.
"You get real smart when you read that thing. Forming partnerships with a journal like that is perfect to me for the Mac," Burns told MacNewsWorld. "It's where it should be delivered."
An influential education market -- where Apple already has made inroads -- could play a role in initial marketing efforts, Burns suggested.
It may be that Apple has to play whatever cards it can at launch so that other parts of its business won't suffer if the iPad is an iFail.
"We've seen the failure of a new product affect the desirability of an ensemble of products," noted Burns, "so there is a risk for this thing."
(from internet)