Post 2008. The age of ‘Mobile’. #005

The iPhone.

Hello.

Apple has always been very particular when it comes to their advertising and product launches. The are masters of content and engagement. The iphone advert is brilliant.

When the Macintosh was launched, it wrote hello on screen. There is continuity and evolution that goes unnoticed in their approach, whether it be this advert of the colours of icons used in the ios operating system.  

The iPhone advert links to the 1984 advert with the previous mac. When the advert was launched, a whole generation of Apple users remember. There is a strong loyalty towards Apple products that you don't find in others.

[sidenote] Even more weirdly, the voiceover for the Applie advert in 1984 was the Actor Helmut Bakaitis, who went on to play the role of the Architect in the Matrix Trilogy.  

The advert for the iPhone 10 however showed the physics and the graphics, the ability to do a movie emoji.  'Look at me I'm wiggling the dog on the screen', wiggling? I watched when it was launched. Soon after, the launch itself became the subject of comedy.

This year (2022) saw a milestone as total sales top $1.5 Trillion dollars in revenue, alongside a market share 18 percent in new sales.

We can take pictures, we can do all our ‘WhatsApping’ to friends, check email, browse the web, and play games.

Apple set a benchmark with the £1000 phone, and I love Apple for that. I think people are waking up to the fact that it's not revolutionary in its value. Subsequently we are focusing less on the total price and more on the monthly cost and and contract length. The business model will change and it's almost certainly going to move, probably to a rental market which is a little ironic.  I grew up with a company called Radio Rentals who used to rent televisions. They went bust because people started buying their televisions and now we're going back to a rental model again.  

If look at Apple's turnover and their share price at a similar time you'll see the link and realise why the iPhone in particular is so important to their business.

Moving on it is likely to be the focus on the camera (no pun intended) that drives the market further as we update our instagram and tik tok personas in search of fame, fortune and influencer recognition.

Big Data, Curation and Co-Creation

YouTube has millions and millions and millions of videos.  How do you bring all that content together? How do you know what you've got? How do you know what to show as a result of a search from a visitor?  

You don't want to pay YouTube to advertise your product and then find your ad is shown with content may be less than appropriate.  That has happened.  Mainstream advertisers pulling away from Internet advertising, pulling away because they don't know where their brand is going to be placed.  They don't know how their brand will be associated with content. There has to be some form of curation.

This is equally important for Amazon, Etsy or Ebay that need to curate listings in order to sell product, Google in order to feed pages and sell advertising or Facebook in order to link people. These organisations are incredibly clever at curating their content to sell advertising and make money.

They appear less inclined to use their talents to safeguard the users who frequent they sites. Their defence appears to be the use of a large' statistic, in this case 3500 people on Facebook being saved by early respsonders.

Curation of content is really really important.  

We went through an age of search, we moved into an age of social and now we've moved into an age of mobile.  Those that were good in one age don't necessarily transfer and succeed in another. Google is Search. Arguably Facebook was Social. If I gave you a piece of paper could you write down the names of all your 'friends'? Would you even recognise them if you passed them in the street?

We are so in love with these things (phones) that we forget we live in the world. We spend some much time watching other people having fun.

Kaplan & Haenlein (2010) define social media based on user generated content.

Social Media is a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content. Kaplan & Haenlein (2010, page 61)  

For Co-Creation and Service dominant logic (see Vargo & Lusch 2004), they provide a useful table on page 3 that considers the "Schools of Thought and Their Influence on Marketing Theory and Practice model"

Alternatively, should you be inclined, I would recommend you watch Season 6, Episode 3 of Futurama from 2010, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1630892/

Fry and Bender compete to see who can get the most fans on their Twitter-like application on their new eyePhones, not knowing that it's actually part of Mom's evil conspiracy to unleash a new virus on people's brains.

In the future, it will be interesting to see what happens with Twitter now that Elon Musk has an interest.

You are too concerned with what was and what will be. There's a saying: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present. Oogway to Po under the Peach Tree, Kung Fu Panda (2008)

References

Kaplan, A., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business Horizons, 53(1), 59–68.

Vargo, S., & Lusch, R. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68(1), 1–17.