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Lack Of iTunes Phone Marketing Irks Motorola
Alias777 writes "Motorola has criticized Apple for not marketing three proposed new phones that will be able to play downloaded music from Apple's iTunes service. "[Steve Jobs'] perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday," says Ron Garriques, president of Motorola's mobile phone division. In response, Motorola has delayed release of the iTunes-equipped phones a few more months."
Seems to me that Motorola can complain all they want about Apple. If they delay their product out of annoyace at Steve, they're the ones who will lose revenue, not Apple. Apple is going to continue to sell iPods with or without Motorola.
I don't get why they would even whine about this. They should concentrate on launching their phones and spend a little less time criticizing someone who has been an extremely successful businessman and might know a thing or two about consumer marketing.
If anyone knows how to market a product that works with Apple technology, it is Apple. Conventional marketing doesn't quite fly with their products, and would stand completely out of place beside their current efforts. Motorola should realize that their hardware stands to make them a lot of money given the market/mindshare of iTMS. They should just learn to ride the wave when it comes.
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"If they [Motorola] delay their product out of annoyace at Steve, they're the ones who will lose revenue, not Apple."
This is exactly true, and everybody knows it, including Motorola.
But consider the following statements, which one sounds better?
"We, Motorola, are not done with our product that we have been hyping for a while now, so please trust us, it's not vaporware, we really will ship it at some unknown point in the future."
or
"Any delays in our product shipment are entirely Apple's fault."
This is called blame shifting, and sounds a lot like what 4 year old children do to each other ("I only punched her because she looked at me funny! It's not my fault, it's hers!").
Motorola complaining about how Apple markets? Need anyone remind Mr. Garriques that the Apple brand, which just had its most profitable, highest revenue-generating quarter in the company's entire history, has achieved the status of cultural icon and introduced one "it" product after another since Jobs' return?
Nevermind the fact that Motorola's current line up is, on an economy of scale, as unwiedly, unattractive, unimaginatively-designed and poorly built as the DPC-550 flip phone they introduced some ten years ago.
Garriques has missed the point. Jobs' approach is right (big surprise).
The more advance notice you give of a product offering, the more the momentum dies down when the product is actually available--especially if you aren't ready to deliver. Apple learned this lesson the hard way in the mid-90s when the first PowerPC Macintoshes were not being delivered in time to meet demand.
Apple has taken numerous steps to ensure sustained growth... one of these is delaying marketing until the product arrives. Then they blitz... Doing it the other way around, you're banking everything on that first week. Now people know it's out there, big deal.
When Apple has a great idea, what they want to do is create yet another cultural phenomenon. One way to do this is to rely heavily on word of mouth to generate buzz... Do you see ANY other computer manufacturers inserting logo stickers in their packaging? Do you see anyone driving a car with a Windows or Dell sticker on the rear windshield? You'll see it with Apple owners all the time (myself included). Why? Because since the days of Guy Kawasaki and the EvangeList, evangelizing has always been one of Apple's marketing strongholds... it has to be backed up, of course, by good product.
Dell isn't an amazing piece of machinery, it's a discount box... Naturally, who the hell cares to advertise they own a Dell? Owning a Dell certainly doesn't signal that you have, indeed, arrived. It just means you're cheap.
Another thing... Apple's stores... walk by... do you see how it works? Huge glass windows, uncluttered real estate... white backdrops against which the products stand out like fashion displays.... People are magnetized by it and go in. Make no mistake, every element of the Apple Store design was pretty carefully conceived to maximize marketing potential.
Want a PC Clone? Go to Best Buy and search for it amidst a sea of heavily cluttered displays with unknowledgeable people who don't know the damnedest thing about computers. So there you are.
Apple builds an experience, and they want to keep building it. You know... I never would have thought it, but the first time I was peeking into a Mercedes at the Mercedes-Nissan dealership that serviced my Nissan, the salespeople knew exactly what they were doing when they handed me the keys to an $80,000 S-class sedan with only these words, "Just bring it back before we close." That's all it took... I was hooked by the experience of driving that thing and could never be the same. Next car I got was a Mercedes C240 with a very competitive lease. Why? Oh, come on... they know I'll be back for more.
So does Apple.
So Motorola don't like the way Apple promote things?
Given the fact that every time I see a Motorola advert I want to smash the thing with a brick, but iPods are so trendy that no-one even says "mp3 player" when "iPod" will do, this is rather like Lada complaining about Rolls Royce's build-quality.
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Motorola hasn't delayed the release of the phone, it's just delayed showing and announcing the phone. From the several articles on the subject that I've read, Motorola doesn't in fact appear to be "irked" and they have not in any way "criticized" Apple. In fact, from the AP article on the subject, Motorola seems to be agreeable to the decision: "'We were doing it (the announcement) the old way,' Zander said." Alias777 probably should have read the article.
What Moto is saying here is that the marketing of a phone is different than the marketing of a normal consumer product, because the chain of sales has so many links. Moto sells in bulk to carriers, a carrier markets though an array of retail and wholesale channels, and it simply isn't possible to pave the way for a new product through those channels with "need to know" secrecy.
The fundamental problem is most likely because Motorola's primary customers are Verizon, Sprint, and Cingular.... where Apple's primary customers are just people.
The wireless companies take time to react to things. They are slow. They need to know about a product well ahead of time so that they can develop their marketing materials, do studies to determine the proper price point, and work out any implementation details on their networks. So Motorola normally gives them a several month lead time on new products so they can get ready.
Apple, on the other hand, sells to you and me. We don't need prep time to buy an iPod, we just buy one.
The thing is, in this market, end-user customers are a tiny, tiny fraction of the total market. Unless and until the big cellular carriers are selling this phone, Motorola just isn't going to move very many. The 'announce Sunday, ship Monday' culture simply DOES NOT WORK for their customers, the people who buy 98% of their product. Without that long lead time and solid coordinated pushes from the wireless carriers, an iTunes phone won't sell well. By the time the channel is really ready to start pushing them, the initial buzz will be all gone, and the product may never do well.
This is a case, I think, where Motorola is right to be upset with Apple. Apple, however, may not care. An announcement today of products available in the summer may impact THEIR sales as people delay purchases. So this move is likely in Apple's best immediate interest. It's a big problem for Motorola, and may have a bad long-term impact on Apple due to fewer iTunes customers.
Apple may be becoming a bit dangerous to partner with.... it'll bear watching.
[Steve Jobs'] perspective is that you launch a product on Sunday and sell it on Monday,
They left off the last step. It should be: Launch a product on Sunday, sell it on Monday, actually ship it to the customer two months later.
I love my Mac, but c'mon, pratically every new Apple product launch is accompanied by a long waiting list for said product immediately afterwards.
As I saw it, Motorola was planning to heavily pre-market these phones. That is, announce them and show them off long before they were ready to be sold.
Then Apple said, "Don't do that." They didn't want hype surrounding something that wasn't even available yet. This is something Apple has been moving away from.
So, really, Moto was going to announce these too soon, and agreed not to based on Steve's feedback. That's totally different from what this post implies.
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Motorola takes forever to develop and launch phones. For example, the v600 and the phones based on the same platform (basically all of the vXXX phones with some exceptions) were all supposed to start shipping in Q2 of 2003. They ended up not shipping until Q2 of 2004, literally a year late.
A couple of years ago one of my very good friends was hired as part of the small team designing new phones for Moto when they realized they were losing market share because their phones basically sucked. Even he didn't know when the v600 was actually going to ship, and he helped design the damned thing!
Differences in marketing between consumers and phone carriers aside, Motorola has a horrible history of delivering their products late. Past performance would indicate that they are shifting the blame to Apple in this instance even though they have no idea when their product will truly be ready.
If anyone could figure out how to make a one button cell phone that works it would be apple and it would sell like crazy. My cell phone has way too many buttons (motorola C450).