g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets
Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

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Wednesday, August 8, 2007
16:15 - Those commercials warped my fragile little mind

(top)
You know what I find funniest about perennial Apple detractors? They always seem to have in their portfolio of complaints that Apple's products are winning because of "slick marketing".

As though Apple sends pairs of guys in white shirts and skinny ties on bikes from door to door with an irresistible sales pitch. As though their ads, while good, are better or more persuasive than anyone else's. As though nobody else has marketing, slick or otherwise.

What's the premise here? That Dell and Creative and Microsoft couldn't sell any DJs and Zens and Zunes because their marketing all sucked? ... I mean, yeah, okay, it did, but that's beside the point. Is the idea that a market-defining critical mass of people is susceptible to the power of suggestion to the point that they're going to plunk down $400 for an MP3 player purely on the strength of whose TV ad was prettier? Do we really believe that?

Let me remind such people that Apple had ads—good ads, at that—back in the early 90s when everything sucked. Remember "The Power to Be Your Best"? And yet all that did was provide an incongruous backdrop to Apple's long slide and near-demise.

That said, though: what can one say about an ad that doesn't need anything but rotating images of the product, followed by its name, and some gently hooky music, to sell it against all competitors? That's called existing mindshare, and it has nothing to do with marketing. It has everything to do with having built a reputation, slowly and painfully, and carefully pruned and groomed that reputation with product enhancements and announcements that made a compelling value proposition over the course of years.

When a market-defining critical mass of people responds to that, you win.

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© Brian Tiemann