Last January, Apple deflated the giant CES press juggernaut by launching the iPhone a few hundreds of miles away at Macworld Expo. This year, a year after it’s unveiling, CES suffered the same scene-stealing effect, and Macworld hasn’t even happened yet! Dozens, and it felt like hundreds, of new cell phones were unveiled at CES and almost everyone one of them was compared to the iPhone. Surprisingly, the general consensus seems to indicate that not one of them beat, or even matched, the iPhone.
You have to admire Apple’s brand strength and the game-changing ability to shake up an industry that Apple had no prior experience in, and according to some technical analysts, no business being in at all. If you perform a Google search for “compared to iphone CES” you will find pages of search results showing a sample of the comparisons being made between the products at CES 2008 and the iPhone from Macworld 2007 (which, I seem to recall, had more features than the version that ultimately hit the streets).
Perhaps the most astonishing thing is how crappy the phone really is as a phone. Similar to the iPod, it falls short compared to its competitors in many ways. No support for Exhange or Lotus Notes makes it terrible for enterprise users. The browser can’t play flash movies so they conned YouTube into making special versions of their most popular videos just for iPhone users. The memory is very limited and it has no expansion capability. It has zero physical buttons – a mistake that pretty much every wanna-be at CES was not willing to make. And most importantly, it’s stuck on AT&T which, according to most users and Consumer Reports, is in a dead heat with Sprint for the bottom of the barrel for quality and service. Not to mislead – it’s a marvelous product in many ways, too. Its combination of small combined with easily the most intuitive user interface and robust media capabilities make it a delight to play with.
I am particularly grateful that Apple entered this market, even though I will never get one as long as they are stuck with AT&T. The changes in the phones that have already resulted form their entry are remarkable, even though a little short of being truly competitive from a gadget sexiness perspective.
What can we, as marketers, learn from this? Two rather obvious things:
1. Customer loyalty can too easily be undervalued. Oddly, Apple built that loyalty with great products and great marketing but to my knowledge, they didn’t do it by publicly listening to them. You may find it easier and better to do it in plain sight.
2. Recognizing a market that is completely saturated with second-rate products like the previous generation of cell phones is good business. It’s easier to stand out when everyone else is wearing the same shade of gray.
Photo from All About Symbian
