This paper is about Apple and its information gathering techniques. The company uses information to enhance its marketing decision making capabilities, which in turn allows the company to have innovative marketing. There is also a discussion of customer relationship management and how it pertains to information and to the overall marketing strategy of the company.
Apple is a consumer electronics designer and manufacturer. The company sells its products around the world, and has a reputation for engendering strong brand loyalty. This paper will discuss the way that the company uses information to enhance its customer relationship marketing.
CRM
Apple utilizes a number of different resources in order to enhance its customer relationship management. Apple is focused on customer research. The company is interested not in what products it can offer to consumers, but in how consumers use their electronics. One objective that Apple has with new product development is to anticipate consumer needs and then meet them proactively. Inside CRM (2009) notes that Apple takes time to understand consumer needs through research but also through interaction. The company holds expos, engages in relationships with bloggers and the education community, and has its own stores to help provide channels for feedback. These channels are then turned into new products and updates to old products.
Apple also reads trends in the market to identify new opportunities. When the iPhone was originally being planned, it was the iPad. However, when sales of Blackberries and Palms began to increase and consumers started demanding cell phones with cameras and other attributes, Apple switched to a phone product instead. Now both the iPhone and the iPad are hit products, and consumers use them in entirely different ways.
The company has also responded to the need to capture a greater share of corporate business by introducing apps for the iPhone that would have greater appeal for businesses (Musico, 2008). It became evidence early in its introduction that the iPhone would compete against the corporate-centric Blackberry. Apple began to gather feedback from the corporate world in order to shape a strategy to make the iPhone more attractive to that segment of the market. As a result, Apple was able to begin to win market share away from the Blackberry, by finding ways to respond to the challenge of meeting the needs of corporate users.
The company also solicits feedback directly in order to gather more information. Apple Customer Pulse is a system that the company uses in order for customers to provide feedback to Apple directly about their purchases. The company solicits this information because it feels that its loyal customers will be willing to provide it. Thus, the company has created a feedback channel for information other than customer complaints. In addition, the company is builds feedback mechanisms into its software as well, that allows for usage data to be relayed to the company providing feedback about popular features and allowing the company to get a better understanding of how its customers use its products. This understanding will help Apple to better predict future usage patterns.
Apple always wants to be out front of trends in its industry. This characterizes the type of data that it wants to receive. Market feedback data, for example, reflects old news for the company about its competitive position. Apple knows, for example, that it is losing market share to Android but uses that information to help it search for the knowledge it truly needs -- what is Android doing that Apple is not and how can Apple leapfrog Google and regain that market share.
Apple uses a variety of information sources in order to help make marketing decisions. It wants to be a leader in the field and not reactionary, so it uses the information it gathers to try and determine future trends in the industry. This information provides the basis for superior decision-making that allows Apple to design products and marketing approaches that are game-changing, rather than reactionary. The decision-making support is based on understanding the needs of customers perhaps more acutely than the customers themselves understand those needs. The iPad is a good example of this, because there was no market for a tablet and many people might have wondered what the point of the product was. There were, of course, millions of people who found immediate use for the iPad and Apple now sells tens of billions of dollars of them. This is simply because the iPad was something the company understood the need for, because it had enough information to truly understand the needs of its customers.
You’re 83% through this paper. Sign up to read the full paper.
Sign Up Now — Instant Access Already a member? Log inAlways verify citation format against your institution’s current style guide requirements.