New Product Development and Branding: MacBook Pro

Running head: NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND BRANDING
New Product Development and Branding: MacBook Pro
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1NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND BRANDING
1. Introduction
The MacBook Pro is a high end personal and portable computer line of the Macintosh
computer family. It was introduced in January 2006, and at present, it is available in 13 and 15
inch screen size. The latest MacBook Pro has been introduced with fourth generation technology
with Touch Bar and USB-C in 2016 (apple.com, 2019). The third generation contained Retina
Display and to make a difference with third generation, Apple introduced Touch Bar and USB-C
in the fourth generation. The product has Apple’s own operating system, that is, Mac OS. The
fourth generation has battery life of up to 10 hours with built-in 54.5-watt-hour lithium-polymer
battery for 13inch and 58.0-watt-hour for 15 inch, 61W USB-C Power Adapter and up to 30 days
of standby time (apple.com, 2019). The market competitors of MacBook Pro are Dell XPS,
ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Razer Blade Stealth, Surface Laptop 2, and HP Spectre X360 (Smith,
2018). This report will highlight the promotional strategies that can be adopted by Apple to make
a global market entry with its high end portable computer MacBook Pro. The report will discuss
the competitive position of the product in the market through Porter's competitive theory, and its
importance-performance (IPA) framework, and its intended position through BCG portfolio
matrix and product lifecycle curve (PLC) and on the basis of the analysis, promotional strategies
for MacBook Pro will be recommended.
2. Analysis for determination of promotional plan
2.1 Porter's competitive strategy
Porter's competitive theory demonstrates the relative position of a brand in the industry.
This competitive theory is used to get an overview of the competitive position of a particular
product or service and recommend the correct strategy for market entry based on the relative

2NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND BRANDING
market position. It also helps to determine the whether the profitability of the firm is above or
below the industry average (Wicker et al., 2015).
Figure 1: Porter's generic strategies
(Source: Wicker et al., 2015)
From the above diagram, it can be said that a product can take three types of strategies to
enter a market and gain competitive advantage, and those are, cost leadership, differentiation,
and focus, and focus has two dimensions, cost focus and differentiation focus. For a broad
market, to gain competitive advantage, a brand should choose between cost leadership or
differentiation strategy. Thus, when Apple is making a global market entry with MacBook Pro,
then the competitive market scope is very broad. In this case, it should choose between cost
leadership and differentiation.
Cost leadership strategy allows a brand to lower the price in the market and gain a market
share as a low cost producer, while in the differentiation strategy, a brand launches unique

3NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND BRANDING
product or service with features that are widely valued by the customers (Salavou, 2015). In this
strategy, the firms choose one or more product or service attributes, which is perceived as unique
and highly important for the buyers and for its uniqueness, a premium pricing strategy is usually
adopted by the firms. The given product, that is, MacBook Pro by Apple, should adopt the
differentiation strategy for global market entry. It is a high end laptop by Apple and the other
products by Apple are highly valued by the customers for high quality performance, long battery
life, bug free OS, camera performance etc. Hence, the brand value for Apple products is very
high in the market and thus, the firm has been using premium pricing strategy for all other
products. Thus, for MacBook Pro also, Apple has introduced unique features than its competitors
and therefore, differentiation and premium pricing on the basis of brand value and uniqueness
should be adopted by it for global market entry and achieving competitive advantage.
2.2 Importance-performance analysis (IPA) framework
Importance-performance analysis (IPA) framework is a technique which is widely used
for measuring the service quality of a product or service. This is based on the customer
satisfaction regarding the performance of the product or service and expectation from that. In
other words, IPA focuses on the gap between the customer expectation on the significance or
importance of the product or service and judgment about the performance of the same (Sethna,
2015). The IPA for MacBook Pro for its promotional strategy for a global market entry is
described below.