Marketing Mix Analysis

Marketing mix of Apple Inc or 4Ps

by Faizul Haque

Apple has been the most successful company in the history. It made a strong brand image by providing innovative and quality products to its customers. When a person uses an Apple product, s/he only just does not use it, but also develop an experience. In this post, I elaborated the marketing mix of apple inc. or 4 Ps of Apple Inc.

Marketing mix of Apple Inc

The 4 Ps of Apple Inc includes products, price, people, and promotion. Each of these four parts we will discuss in this post.

Apple Product and Service Strategy

From the inception of Apple Inc, the founder named Steve Jobs always tried to innovate and introduce new products with unique benefits and features. Job’s thinking and effort were always to give a solution to problems with electronics such as computers, smartphones, wearable, and software. Apple has a large portfolio of technological products.

The product strategy analysis is based on the product offerings of Apple. Existing products are considered as it is the portfolio of Apple products which are currently sold in the market.

  • Wearable – Apple Watch, iPad, iPhone & iOSApple iPad
  • Computers – Mac Book, Macbook Pro, MacBookAir, IMac, Mac Pro, Mac mini, Display, etc
  • Software – MacOS, iLife, iWork, Logic Pro X, Final Cut Pro X, Swift Playgrounds etc
  • Apple Music – Musing streaming service of Apple.
  • Apple TV – First, Second, And Third Generation Apple TV.
  • iPod & iTunes
  • iCloud & Apple Pay

 

Apple Pricing Strategies

Apple prices its product by premium pricing strategy.  It does not compete with the competitors. Rather, Apple sets the price much above than that of its competitors. This means, Apple products are only available to the higher class people in the society. By that way it provides a unique image of the product and creates demand.

While distribute directly, it does not give any discount on any products of Apple. But for the refurbished products, the picture is different. The price changes in this case. [3]

Also, they keep the price rational by providing unique category of products. No computers match the iMac’s 27” display. No laptop is thinner than Macbook Air. [4]

 

Apple Place Strategy [Distribution]

The corporate headquarters of Apple was built in California with a space of six buildings of 850,000 square feet.

For the distribution, Apple store was founded in 2001. Currently, it has 490 stores in 20 countries. [1]Though these stores have built strong position in United States and United Kingdom, the position remains weak in the Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh. They, recently, decided to setup their distribution channel in India.

The chain of retail stores that deal with distribution of Apple products. Also, all of the stores provide tech support and repairs at free of cost to the public.

Apple Inc. also uses resellers to distribute its products. There are two types of resellers Apple uses. One of them is Apple authorized resellers and another one is Apple premium resellers. Apple authorized resellers points sell products from multiple brands including Apple’s products eg. Croma, Vijay Sales, etc. But in premium resellers, only products from Apple are sold eg. Maple, Unicorn, Aptronix, etc. [2]

Apple also sells its products through retail shops and online selling portals. Apple has an online store available in 39 countries. [1]

Apple Promotion Strategies

Apple advertises its products in online Medias such as its own websites, online magazines, and newspapers. It also uses its point of sales to advertise its products and educates the customers. Actually, Apple does not spend large amount of money on advertising like other companies do. The products they offer have been developing quality experience which has been working as a promotional strength. For example, for iPhone, they never made any printing advertisement.

Finishing the 4 Ps of the company, you may want to know about Apple Inc’s SWOT Analysis. To have an insight of the internal and external environment analysis of Apple Inc. Please read to know the internal and external strategic analysis of Apple. 

Related:

Sources

  1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Store
  2. quora.com/What-are-the-key-differences-between-Apple-Authorized-Resellers-and-Apple-Premium-Resellers
  3. mpk732.wordpress.com/2015/05/16/apples-sales-and-channel-strategy-key-to-its-success/comment-page-1/
  4. blog.kissmetrics.com/7-strategies-apple-marketing/