News

Apple resorts to aggressive marketing tactics

Hot on the heels of its four-day Black Friday discounts in November, Apple has continued to lure buyers by offering limited-period discounts via its Apple GiveBack programme. These trade-in offers, which the company originally only promoted with online campaigns, have now also found their way to its high street stores – in a manner that doesn’t impress everybody.

From last week, the company co-opted its Genius Bar Displays in Apple Stores across the US as well as Today at Apple Forum Displays to encourage clients to buy an iPhone XR or iPhone XS.

From Wednesday, the firm also started using animated video demo loops playing on the displays, with text shouting “Limited Time. iPhone XR from $449.”

Until a while ago, Apple only used Genius Bar Displays for Apple Support videos and product tips. In November, it started using them to highlight imminent Today at Apple sessions. This enhanced the consistency of the firm’s message at every location.



In updated retail outlets, the Video Wall runs curated artwork playlists or Forum Displays, but until now promotions fell outside the scope of their use. Recently, however, the company’s trade-in deals started to permeate just about all its public communication channels, including bigger and bigger website banners, push notifications from the Apple Store app, social media ads and marketing emails.

A number of analysts have found this approach just a little bit too aggressive. Today at Apple was originally meant to inspire clients to explore their creative talents, and contaminating in-store messaging with marketing hype obscures this programme’s meaning.

In the past, Apple stated that Forum Displays were intended to offer enriching learning experiences. Exploring the trade-in value of used iPhones might technically be a learning experience, but many people will not see it that way, and this could have a lasting negative impact on Apple’s image.

Before you go

After spending over 20 years working with Macs, both old and new, theres a tool I think would be useful to every Mac owner who is experiencing performance issues.

CleanMyMac is highest rated all-round cleaning app for the Mac, it can quickly diagnose and solve a whole plethora of common (but sometimes tedious to fix) issues at the click of a button. It also just happens to resolve many of the issues covered in the speed up section of this site, so Download CleanMyMac to get your Mac back up to speed today.

mac-pc

Tags

About the author

Chris

I've been a passionate evangelist for Apple and the Macintosh throughout my working life, my first love was a Quadra 605 working with a small creative agency in the south of Norfolk UK in the mid 1990's, I later progressed to other roles in other Macintosh dominated industries, first as a Senior graphic designer at a small printing company and then a production manager at Guardian Media Group. As the publishing and printing sector wained I moved into Internet Marketing and in 2006 co-founded blurtit.com which grew to become one the top 200 visited sites in the US (according to Quantcast), at its peak receiving over 15 million visits per month. For the last ten years I have worked as an Affiliate and Consultant to many different business and start ups, my key skill set being online marketing, on page monetisation, landing page optimisation and traffic generation, if you would like to hire me or discuss your current project please reach out to me here.

You can also follow me on: and

Add Comment

Click here to post a comment

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.