Success Stories (U24: D1)

Learning Objective 1 (U24): Understand the products that are produced within and across media industries

D1 (U24)

I have decided to look at brand of Apple. A company that started with the Apple Macintosh computers and now supply 216.76 million phones around the world. The company is worth £767 billion or $1 trillion dollars and with the launch of new products such as a online streaming service like Netflix called Showtime this is only going to increase with it already being labelled the world’s most valuable brand. In 2018 their brand value grew by 16 percent to $214.5bn in a year. This is the first time any company has ever made over $200bn in twelve months.

Apple was originally started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wazniak and Ronald Wayne, the company grew at an alarming rate. The first time they diversified from the Macintosh computers was they released the iPod. It was a small portable device that allowed you to carry thousands of songs around with you at all times and from the culture of public interaction was changed. The iconic white headphones have been seen every day since then.

Apple products can be found all over the world with many people owning and using more than one product, in western society it’s common for many people to have an iPhone, iPad and then a Laptop which would also be Apple. Something Apple do very well is keeping you on brand with the products being beautifully synced. There are many different apple products stretching across many different platforms from phones, computers and tablets and many more. All your different apple products can be synced through iCloud, Bluetooth and apple ID. This will encourage customer to keep buying into apple and keep using their products. They have also made sure that any of their subscription products will work across all of the platforms. Things like apple music works across the desktop to the Apple watch and to the apple watch. The products obviously range in price but Apple has always been known for being more of a premium range product. While the price has always been high, the product does last so it’s always been seen good value for money.

Although apple TV does not show much of its own content (yet) it distributes and provides other content through their own platform such as YouTube, Spotify and Netflix. Meaning that viewers and audience will almost have the ease of having several of their favourite media services all in one place. Apple TV has never really taken off like other products as I think they’ve not pushed the product as much. I can see this changing as more and more people are interested in the streaming services that can be used on the apple product.

Apple also have iTunes and Apple music. While the two services seem to be similar, they’re actually very different. iTunes is a way of organising any music, video and TV while shopping for other things to watch. It can stream but is not like apple music at all, you can pay and download a TV series but not stream a series like you can on Netflix. This means that Apple Music is a subscription based service allowing the customer to spend little but continuously every month and Itunes is a payment based service. You pay there and then for the media you want.

Apple music

When looking at this graph we see that apple music was released in 2015 and has had a upward trend and in 2019 it should it 50 million subscribers. Although we have seen their competitors Spotify continue to dominate with up to 83 million users as of June 2018 apple music within its first 3 years has managed to carve out around a 3^rd of the audiences, this could be down people having brand loyalty to apple and trust the products and service they produce. Another reason they growth has been so well could be down to there clever marketing and advertisement of the brand as a whole and Apple music as well offering deals such as “3 months free” I think It’s important to remember to that apple didn’t invent the first computer or mobile phone but once they got into the market they redesigned the whole industry. Eventually there’s evidence that this will happen with the online subscription services like Apple music and Showtime.

As you can see from the graph below Apple’s main income comes from the iPhone sales and that has been the way Apple has made the majority of it’s profits since the first iPhone in 2004. 79% of the income reported at Apple is still from a physical product but that means 21% is from online services and downloads. That’s a rough figure of $45 billion from other services.

While the downloads and streaming of Apple music might not be as high as Spotify. It’s important to remember that this is one faction of a very big company, with Apple’s new service of Showtime we are prepared to see their digital market share grow even bigger. When they do launch, they will have to take on other streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Now tv. Although that doesn’t leave much room for Apple. It’s also important to remember three things. The Tv viewing platforms are heavily saturated in today’s market with there being several different services available. Apple doesn’t need to be the best at it as it’s not their whole business (Unlike Spotify and Netflix) and also Apple have the money and creative teams to push their way into the sector. Looking back on the Apple music stats. They’ve taken 1/3 of the online streaming services away from Spotify in three years. They have also gone from no mobile history in 2009 to being the most dominant mobile phone provider in 2019. Lastly they already have a physical product of the Apple TV, this will no doubt be the hook that we’ve seen with previous products. Buy the Apple TV and get 6 months free of Showtime, once again hooking you into buying apple products.

Apple has recreated it’s brand several times over, due the business evolving to meet current day needs. Originally starting with the Macintosh computer Where they were daring people to think different. The famous 1984 advert was a way of looking to the future in a way we would never again. After that huge success Apple moved on to the iPod a portable music storage device, this became a much-needed gadget of it’s time but originally you could only add music to it via a Mac computer. This was until they launch a multidevice friendly iTunes but people already had the Apple bug by then. Now days apple has modernised so much and has many different platforms such as the iPhone iPad and many more. The fundamentals and layout of all these products are very similar which is why it is so successful as it will mean that customers and audiences will start to create and have brand loyalty.

You can sign into your Apple music on your Apple TV, iPad, iPhone, Mac Pro and Macbook and they all sync to the iWatch so any music you want to store offline is there for you to listen too. This means if you’re listening to a podcast at work, once you finish you can carry on listening and not miss anything. 

Over all these platforms you can mostly access the same apps and features such as Siri. With the introduction of iCloud and apple ID it now means you can sync your Apple products together, for example you could take a photo on you iPhone and it can be instantly downloaded to your apple laptop this is one of the many reasons why apple is so popular and has a strong advantage over its competitors. It’s not something that we see as special anymore it’s something we expect of Apple products and when you have them all in unison it actually makes your life better.

One of the ways Apple has done so well is because they allow other platforms like Spotify to work on their devices. This gives them knowledge on how well the other platforms are doing. Apple can see the amount of people downloading such apps and how long they are spending on them. What they have done is to build several products that are so important and dominate the industry that all of these apps need them. This was none of the streaming apps try to build a better smartphone and apple know they make money from people buying their products to use others.

Traditionally apple has always tried to push themselves towards creative industries such photographers, artists and people who thought outside the box. In todays form Apple has given the best technology to so many people, they offer the best looking, best technology to every person who’s using the product. While there might be better phones to buy, none are reached in the same as Apple’s iPhone. They allow other’s to push the technology in the smaller components like the camera or battery life and then bundle it all together to be a looking product.

Most people do not care if the camera is 4K or 1080P they just care that it looks great and is user friendly, something the iPhone has always been.

Apple have always used very clever marketing to advertise the products, from comedy to sleek advertising with simple campaigns. They’ve ran different campaigns for the same product at the same time. Allowing people of different demographics to see the same product, Iphones can be used at different levels of simplicity so a middle aged person who is not so technically minded can still have the same device as 16 year old who picks up new technically simply.

Apple as a brand has a very unique way of advertising and marketing their products, for example apple market their product through having a constant colour scheme throughout their advertisement of plain white colours with the iconic simple Apple logo with a bite taken out of it. Apple has advertised its products over may different platforms including social media, billboards and TV ads. Social media is one of the most effective methods of advertisement as it in this day and age as it will mean that It can hit the more digitally advanced audience meaning there high-tech gadgets which mean will they will be more likely to buy into it and the apple brand. Another way they market there product is buy turning going to the apple store into an experience and making the apple store covered in there Logo and colour scheme to really go for that futuristic look underlying how modern they are at apple. Apple also advertise there products by making  it so that every product can sync with each meaning you can chare photos on the apple Icould this means that the consumer will likely buy back into apple if he already has a apple product.

The many different Apple devices are each created with the consumer in mind. An apple watch that now ‘survives’ under water has been made with an athlete in mind, a desktop with higher processing power and graphics has been developed to consider a designer/editor or creative mind. Laptops are available in different colours to suit each consumer (rose gold, gold, black, silver) and the several models are appropriate to students, adults and even children. iPads are available in different sizes, with memory and even networking advancements so that children are able to access their products as well as older consumers. The several inbuilt apps (iMovie, App store, Pages, Garageband etc) have each been implemented to again appeals to different audiences. This allows skills to be enhanced and for hobbies to be continued. These are just a few examples of the several products and services offered by Apple to engage and appeal to different audiences.