Apple Marketing 501

Apple presents us all with the equivalent of a graduate level course in marketing according to Harvard Business School professor David Yoffie (Yahoo News story here). Start with a lesson in PR: Apple has generated over $400 million in free publicity since the announcement of their iPhone and it is still months from distribution. As Yoffie says, “No other company has ever received that kind of attention for a product launch…it’s unprecedented.”

Yoffie claims the Apple marketing formula is what allows the company to regularly out-compete its rivals. That formula includes:

• Innovative products
• Keep it simple
• Memorable ads
• Find an enemy
• Work the taste-makers
• Offer surprises
• Put on a show

And nobody does the above much better than Apple. The results are apparent. During the past three years, the market capitalization of Apple stock has swelled from $6 billion to over $75 billion. That’s a marketing lesson you can take to the bank.