Campaign Analysis: iPhone – Creating the Right Hooks

Apple has launched a series of commercials on TV highlighting its various features and USPs. The commercials have been telecast in a lot of prime time slots, indicating a strong marketing intent and expenditure.

Watch 2 of the ads below:

 

Two other ads can be seen here: iBooks, iPod and iTunes

There are plenty of things that are good about the campaign. Let me talk about some of these things:

1. Great Focus on Features: The ads do a great job of highlighting all the features that the iPhone projects as its USP – the App Store, Image scanning, LCD clarity etc. The features, their applications as well as their use in day-to-day life is elucidated. This elucidation is important for the Indian crowds, who still do not use their smartphones to their potential. Illustrations in the ad showing that the features are easy-to use and helpful, will aid in building the iPhone’s image.

2. Use of brand elements: Apple’s major advantage over all competitors, across segments, has been its classy brandform. They have used white, silver and black in designing their goods, to a lot of aesthetic success. They showcase the black iPhone here, and through the ad also send across the message that this is a slim, smartphone carrying through all the design advantages that Apple is known to have.

3. Focus on Lifestyle instead of Business: Another great move by the marketeers at Apple is that they have reinforced iPhone as a great high-end lifestyle phone. The business high-end phone segment is dominated strongly and unshakeably by BlackBerry at the moment. In the absence of a strong, single contender to Lifestyle high-end phones, the youth from upper class families tend to buy BlackBerry. The iPhone, in sync with Apple’s other products is projecting premium lifestyle, wooing the youth of the nation as a major lifestyle accessory. The script fo the ad also projects it as an aspirational product, in line with its premium pricing.

4. Use of Foreign Models: Under most circumstances, I would frown upon the use of foreign models in an ad telecast in India (both for picturisation as well as voiceovers). But in this case, the use of foreign models helps because:

a) Everyone already knows that Apple is a foreign company. Use of Indian models and voiceovers would actually clash with that image formed in the consumer mindspace.

b) It would be difficult to Indianize the product, and moreover, Apple does not need to. The ‘foreign’ nature of the ad projects the image of technological superiority of the product – an association that Apple would prefer to have.

5. Brand Name Prominence: Although the phone and the brand name was easily recognizable, but even then, reiteration of the brand name at the right points in the ad is noticeable.

Hence, this campaign series by iPhone has created just the right hooks to pull customers in. From the script of the ad, projection of features as well as focus on lifestyle – everything is done quite correctly. Kudos!