Integrated Marketing Campaign and Distribution Strategy of Apple Inc.

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Marketing Management
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Blog 1: Integrated Marketing Campaign- The case of Apple Inc.
Search Results for “Apple IMC Strategy”
A GREAT IMC CAMPAIGN: APPLE WATCH
People today have recognised the different communication techniques that are more
effective while coordinating with the other marketing elements. In this rapidly changing
business world and marketing place, there is an emergence of complex competitors (Vargo
and Lusch 2014). Every day, new companies are formed, developed, merged and taken over
in different parts of the world. Along with this daily phenomenon, the modern companies are
required to be smart enough in terms of marketing strategies. IMC (Integrated Marketing
Communication) ensures that there are different objectives of marketing and every objective
has its own plan of communication (Batra and Keller 2016). Within an IMC plan, role of
public relation is identifying the way of communicating with the customers and clients
effectively (Seric, Gil-Saura and Ruiz-Molina 2014) IMC plan, role of public relation is
identifying the way of communicating with the customers and clients effectively. As
organisations depend on the demands for profits, it is very important to identify the ways in
which services and products would be benefitting the customers and the ways in which these

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customers can understand the benefits that they could gain from using those services and
products (E. Prescott 2014).
Like many other modern companies,
Apple Inc. too has turned towards integrating
its advertising efforts with the other
communication techniques like websites,
sales promotions, public relations, internet,
event sponsorships and direct marketing
(Yip, Zhu and Chan 2017). It faced an uphill battle while marketing with the Apple Watch.
The wearable consumer technology is still a new phenomenon for the world, particularly
where the typical functions of smartphone are of great concern. Before Apple even started
promoting its smart watches, the other market leaders like LG already released their own
(Pradhan and Sujatmiko 2014). Hence, this made the marketers get puzzled over the slow
paced marketing campaign of Apple watch. But, at that time, Steve Jobs might just be living
by the maxim “Slow and Steady Wins the Race”.
While Samsung, LG and the other competitors ran with the typical multi-channel
campaigns for reaching the widest possible population (Hogarth 2018). Apple chose to hit the
ground with a 12 page advertisement in Vogue Magazine targeting a specific audience- the
“fashionistas”. Marketers began to buzz about why Apple was marketing its Apple Watch
only to women (Wang and Nien 2016). Not all the readers of Vogue were able to afford
things that they read about in the magazine. Hence, keeping this in mind, Apple chose to
introduce the least expensive version of Apple Watch that cost just 350$ and this allowed the
average customers to perceive these highly
fashionably, super cool and highly valued item as
much more affordable (Gupta 2017). A wide

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series of cover photos and images of the popular models like Valentino and Manolo Blahnik
wearing the Smart Watch that cemented the image as functional fashion.
However, Apple Inc. knew that Vogue alone was not sufficient to fuel the fire of the
Apple Watch and this is why, its measured integrated campaign gradually unfolded with eye-
catchy television advertisement which looked
much like a live demonstration of the features
of the watch, featured by Nick Jonas (Evans
2017). It further followed by a wide range of
interviews with Apple execs, bringing Public
Relations (PR) into the mix. Apple let advertising to lead a two pronged approach (Giri and
Sharma 2014). Fashion media wanted to talk about the Apple Watch as it was competing the
modern smart watches, including the luxury ones (Udoh and Alkharashi 2016). Similarly,
Tech media also wanted to talk about it as it was one of the Apple’s electronic products in an
emerging technology.
As this IMC campaign of Apple gained momentum, its social media presence went
into high gear, especially when it saw its competitors to timing the advertisements for their
smart watches around the launch event of Apple Watch (Machado, Cant and Seabone 2014).
Warring Twitter advertisements in between Pebble and Apple showed how intense was the
battle for customer attention when the competing firms were rushing towards capitalising a
new technology at the same time (Jellicorse 2015). The outcome of this was that Apple was
successful at capturing 75.5 percent of the global market of smart watch during the first
quarter of its launch (Chauhan et al. 2016).
Hence, it is to conclude that beyond the application of different channels integrating
perfectly, the final magic of Integrated Marketing Communication, Apple Inc. showed