Marketing Strategy of Apple Company

Advertising Apple always budget themselves to spend on enrolment, billboard ads, radio adverts, bus shelter boards, posters on the side of busses, television ads and many other promotional materials. A large amount of money is spent on these methods and therefore it is important for the marketing team to know how useful the methods are so they can maybe re discuss what works and does not work and change their approach.

Personal Selling

Apple’s personal selling would be their staff within stores. All employees that work in the Apple Inc. stores all have a certain uniform (blue apple shirt with black jeans) and are all highly knowledgeable with all Apple products and approach customers to see if they can be of any assistance. Within the store all products are displayed for customers to test and use and also pick up and feel.Sales Promotion In regards to sales promotion, Apple has used a no-discount pricing strategy both with the products it sells in its own Apple retail stores and with the Apple products sold in other retail chains like WalMart and john Lewis.

There are a few exceptions to the Apple no-discount pricing strategy. For example, when a new generation of iPad, iPhone, iPod or computer is about to be released, authorized Apple products dealers are given permission to discount their existing inventory in order to make room for the newest releases. However, Apple also have discount, deals, promotions, and sale price exceptions to Apple’s no-discount policy, particularly around Black Friday and the Christmas holiday shopping season as-well as offering deals for students going to university to use MacBook’s etc. Apple is currently promoting their latest release of the new 2015 MacBook that is available in Gold, Space Grey and Silver. They release two advertisements of every products one being the ‘Reveal film’ and the other being the ‘Design film’.

The reveal film shows a video advertisement of the actual product and its capabilities and all its new features, this would be shown on television. Whereas the design film can be viewed on the official Apple website and YouTube, this short film usually lasts around 4 to 7 minutes and go through in detail what Apple went through in order to make the design and the specifications as well as the new technology used for enthusiasts to obtain further information on the product.

Public Relations

Apple use public relations in regarding release of their new products every year, they do this by running a live stream event in which can be viewed all over the world. For example on the release of their new iMac’s and iPhone’s they announced a live streaming event that could be viewed on their website in real time at 6PM GMT one of the days in the month September. This was able to be viewed on their official website for anyone to watch. Within the event Apple specialist staff was on a stage with an audience and promoting the release of their new products such as the new iPhone 6, new MacBook Pro and Airs along with the new iMac Desktop.

Direct Marketing

Every person that purchases an Apple product will most likely need to create their own ‘Apple ID’. An Apple ID is their main Apple account that enables them to make purchases, keep their storage on iCloud, hold their information etc. By customers signing up for an Apple ID, Apple now will have their email on the mailing list for the corporation. This builds Apple a huge mailing list in which they can directly send out promotional emails to all their customers on the latest products and deals.

Another way that Apple uses their direct marketing would be their social media networking such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. On Facebook and Twitter Apple try to reply to as many queries and as fast as possible in order to keep up god customer service and for Instagram and YouTube, Apple just use for advertising purposes.Sponsorship Apple has in place a procedure where a certain portion of sales from specific products are donated to the Global Fund to fight HIV/AIDS in Africa; these products are named ‘the Red products’. These are usually iPods and iPads that are in the colour red to promote the charities colour brand. Apple also, in 2014, bought the company ‘Dr. Dre Beats’ for £3bn and now the two founders of Beats now work with Apple to bring out greater and better products.