Apple iPad
Were you following the Apple iPad launch real time yesterday? Call me crazy, but in our house, we had 2 or 3 sites up that were live blogging the event. The marketer in me found the whole thing crazy, hyped and exciting! Today, though, after the hype dust has settled and the order lead time of 3 months has been noted, I wonder what the future will hold for this insanely anticipated product. Below take a look at Apple´s promo video for the iPad and then after, there are a few links that are worth checking out.
¨On multiple occasions, Steve Jobs spoke about creating a new category of devices that would fill the gap between the smartphone and the laptop markets. He slammed netbooks for “not being better than anything.” He wanted something that would be better than a laptop at browsing the web and that could play games, movies, YouTube videos and more.
The answer to that gap, at least for Apple, is the iPad. It’s essentially a giant iPod touch/iPhone with a 9.7-inch screen, 16 to 64 GB of memory, and the ability to run almost every iPhone app in the App Store. It can connect via USB to sync with your PC or Mac, play HD video, act an ebook reader and a lot more.
While there are a lot of functions, all of which we describe below, its killer feature is by far the price. While many predicted it would cost $1,000, the starting price of the iPad is just $499. For comparison, the Kindle DX, which also has a 9.7-inch screen, costs $489, only $10 less than the iPad.¨
Looking at the situation from an eBook perspective, check out Techcrunch´s post yesterday . In this article you are asked to imagine what Amazon´s competitive response should be. After you´ve read that, tell me what you think? It made me think back to a story of a launch response I read a while back on Andy Swan´s blog.
Here is it for your reading pleasure.
In Evansville, IN (where I grew up), there was basically one fast-food restaurant downtown….odd for a city of 100k people but it’s a city that is pretty spread out, and downtown wasn’t exciting.
Anyway, the one down there was a McDonald’s. It did awesome lunch business and was extremely well-run. One of those McD’s where even if the drive thru line went all the way to the road (which it always was at lunch), you still knew you’d be through in 10 minutes and your order would be right.
Of course, this kind of success attracted competition, and a Wendy’s was built very close-by. It was to open on a Tuesday.
So what did McDonald’s do on Wendy’s big grand opening day?
Run a special and try to steal their thunder?
Bring out the clowns and free fries to defend their turf?
Nope…..
McDonald’s shut down that day without notice….repaved the parking lot.
At lunch time, 100s of cars that normally zip through the McD’s in a couple hours were essentially redirected to Wendy’s. A brand new Wendy’s. A Wendy’s with a staff that had absolutely no experience dealing with heavy lunch volume.
Of course, it was a disaster for Wendy’s. Customers that were used to moving through a drive-thru (McD’s) in 7 minutes were honking horns and leaving the line after ordering. The staff was rattled and probably had some defections.
By shutting down, McD’s overwhelmed their competitor into paralysis. They gave all of their normal customers a chance to try the new guy (which they would have anyway)….all at once….on his worst day.
I’m sure that first impression of Wendy’s stuck for a while. I’m sure the next day, a lot of people were VERY glad to see the McDonald’s they had taken for granted back open again.
Win.
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Tags: ebook marketing strategy launch response strategy Apple iPad tablets Amazon Kindle
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