Top 10 Dumb Mistakes even committed by marketing God like Apple

Conventional wisdom says that Apple’s success is the result of superlative marketing.  Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Apple’s marketing has always been mediocre (at best), and at worst has been a complete disaster, dragging back products that otherwise might have been far more successful.

To illustrate this point, I’ve collected a list of Apple’s top 10 dumb marketing mistakes. 

Mistake #10: Overpricing the Macintosh

Apple marketing apparently believed that the added value of the Apple brand, and the superior usability of the product justified a higher price. But the truth is that as Windows became the de-facto standard, the Macintosh environment became a liability that would have required a LOWER price in order to compel people to continue to buy.

 

Mistake #9: Ignoring Computer Games

Apple never attracted game developers to the Macintosh, never launched a game machine, and has only sporadically promoted the iPod and iPhone as handheld gaming platforms.

Since the main strength of the IBM-compatible PC was in business applications, the home and consumer market was available for an alternative platform.  However, Apple’s appeal to the consumer market was vastly weakened by the fact that the Macintosh seldom had the latest and greatest games, which are THE killer applications for a home-based computer platform.

Mistake #8: The Missing Sustainability Report

    

You’d think that a company with Al Gore on its board, and with a reputation for having “green” products, would realize that reinforcing that image is a good idea.  However, Apple’s perceived secrecy around its environmental track record has raised the ire of environmentalists, attracting negative attention to Apple in an area that should be one of the company’s strengths.

Mistake #7: Allowing Macintosh Cloning

     The strategy was an obvious attempt to imitate the “success” of IBM’s strategy of an “open” PC platform.  However, Apple failed to notice that IBM was struggling in the PC market (and would eventually sell it off), and that, in any case, an “open platform” strategy — which worked (sort of) in a geometrically growing market — didn’t make any sense in a mature market where the platform battle was already lost.In addition, the fact that Apple royally screwed its erstwhile partners didn’t win the company any friends in the marketplace, and drove even more potential partners into the Microsoft camp.

Mistake #6: Continued Support of Apple TV

The product is a widely seen as an industry joke.  People don’t want to consume television in this way and there are numerous other platforms that do a much better job at both the delivery and the purchasing of the content.

Mistake #4: Treating Journalists Like Cockroaches

Apple is widely known among business journalists and industry analysts as an insanely difficult company to work with.  Their PR people seldom answer press inquiries and their executives treat journalists as unwanted pests.You end up with articles like What’s the bug up Apple’s @$$? and When did Apple become uncool?

And when you’re really stupid and have a business reporter arrested for reporting about your future product, you get TV coverage like the Jon Stewart video I’ve posted below.

Mistake #3: Pretending They’re the Underdog

    Apple’s market valuation and yearly revenue is currently about the same as Microsoft.  Eventually, even Apple fanboys will figure out that Apple is a corporate behemoth whose corporate headquarters resembles the movie set for an updated remake of 1984, replete with security cameras, secret codes, and all the accoutrement of a police state.

Mistake #2: Censoring the iPhone

Porn is one of the big drivers of traffic on the Internet.  If Apple is going to displace the current PC-based Internet environment, it will need to capture some of that traffic. 

Furthermore, the PC world of porn is having trouble monetizing content in a world where peer-to-peer sharing has become common, a problem that wouldn’t exist in the Apple environment.  Apple marketing is therefore throwing away a multi-billion dollar revenue stream.

Last but not the least.....

Mistake #1: The AT&T Exclusivity Agreement

Apple granted AT&T exclusive rights to the iPhone until 2012.The iPhone has been successful, sure, but think how much more successful it would be if it were supported by every carrier (or even more than just one carrier?  The delay in getting the iPhone on other carriers has created a marketing opening for other platforms, like Android, which otherwise wouldn’t never have had even the ghost of a chance.

So, whats your view on this...