Lessons from Apple

With a friend, you can talk for hours about health care, recession, housing, taxes and the environment. With all these issues (oh yes, don't forget the eye of the Tiger fiasco), is it any wonder that we seek more and more information to be more informed; to make better decisions; and to be more responsible).

But something is happening out there. Our need for information is completely and totally saturated by the volume of information we receive knowingly and unknowingly. "Enough", we say, yet our email box continually runneth over.

And we are blaming Google. A 21 billion dollar company that some claim is the most successful in the history of the world. That's quite a claim!

The anti-Google people have emerged saying that the all consuming search engine is not only eating the world, but is eating itself. Its very strategy of SEO (Search engine Optimization) drives a finite market to an ever increasing number of messages which are ultimately sold at lower and lower prices.

What got me thinking about this was a link to an MSNBC article "Why Apple Does Everything Wrong", sent to me by Wood Foss, Proprietor of Alley Katz in Westerly RI. Apple is not a great internet marketer. It doesn't blog, has a limited presence on face book and believes more in brand focus.

They also makes great products.

Ask anyone who owns Ipods, MAC computers, Iphones; zealots everyone. Thy proclaim the sanctity of their purchasers...and they tell everyone who asks and some who don't.

They also build their brand with very cool television advertising combined with dimensionally hip billboards and exhaustive and credible sales training (check out an Apple Retail store, whew!! and let me know your experience with the sales people) they rock. So here is the irony. A new media company spending more money on traditional forms of old media than on new media internet based platforms.

Whats going on?

I think its the backlash that is making Apple cool. They are doing what everybody talks about, but no "new media" company has had the guts to do except Apple; and that is to not flood the finite market with seemingly "another email" or "another blog" or even "another face book posting"; established by the SEO genies.

Now I am not saying that these tools are not important. Any one in their right mind knows that. It's just that we have become addicted to this "digital crack", so much so that we may have forgotten about human behavior. In fact, a Nasdaq listed company called eXelate has just completed a study that shows 80% of all advertising clicks are done by 16% of the total audience. Sounds like the old 80/20 rule to me.

As new as the new media is, it should teach us that new gets old pretty quickly these days. More importantly, we all need to know how to mix the new media and the old media together to get to our customers with our "message of opportunity" for him

Oh yes, a great product would help too.