Absence makes the heart grow stronger, and in the case of the Apple Store, the sight of that cheerful Post-It note sends hearts racing. But it’s not pure chance, or technical problems, that keep the Post-It in place, it’s something much smarter.
Pick an Apple launch, any Apple launch, and you can guarantee it’ll be accompanied by a sizeable chunk of downtime for the Apple Store, slap bang in the middle of trading hours. What should be classified as commercial suicide for Apple is, in fact, one of the most powerful marketing tools in the world. Read on to find out how.
It’s simple really. Apple trades on buzz like no other company. You won’t find it punting out cheesy viral videos, or paying off early adopters and celebrities to carry the latest iPod. Instead it uses the feverish fanboys of the web to do its dirty work, and all it takes is a single Post-It note.
Take today’s downtime for the launch of the new Mac Mini, iMac and Mac Pro. Apple blocked access to its web stores worldwide for well over two hours. At 11am GMT the first Apple Store went offline in New Zealand. It was rapidly followed by the rest of Apple’s web stores worldwide.
According to analysts Piper Jaffray, Apple sold 2.2 million Macs in the 90 days to March 2009. That’s an average of over 24,000 Macs sold every day, or more than a thousand every hour. And that’s just Macs remember, not iPods, iPhones or any other of its accessories.
It’s fair to estimate Apple’s downtime today cost it a pretty penny. But the trade off for publicity was well worth it.
The moment the first Apple Store dropped off the web, social networks, blogs and news sites began to buzz. Twitter analytics tool Twist shows mentions of “Apple” surging as soon as the stores began going offline.
To put its power in perspective, we’ve compared it with “Skittles” which was the subject of a twitter flood yesterday after a viral marketing stunt went awry. The chart below shows that simply by taking its store down, Apple has generated as much buzz as the largest viral marketing stunt of the last month, and without any of the associated expense or negative publicity.
Likewise, blog posts go into overdrive when Apple shutters its store. Google News reports almost 14,000 news stories written about the Apple Store in the past day, while mentions of it in blog posts have topped 35,000 at the time of writing, according to Technorati.
It’s certain that taking the Apple Store down generates buzz, but is there a technical need for Apple to take its store offline for such a long time? Without knowledge of the inner workings, it’s hard to say. An educated guess is that Apple’s fastidious attention to detail means every page is manually checked in minute detail, before being uploaded, adding an extra delay.
From then, the store’s new contents will be cached and spread around the Akamai network, which Apple uses to balance load and make sure its customers get a speedy response from the site.
That, if anything, is likely to be the bottleneck, although Apple is the only retailer to completely block access at the time of a launch, while rolling out new products doesn’t cause a problem for Dell, Amazon or any other online retailer.
The big question is whether Apple actually profits from the buzz it creates, and whether it can turn the anticipation of fans clamouring to get through the door into a flood of purchases as soon as the new products go on sale.
What do you think of Apple’s marketing? Is it the greatest trick ever, or the world’s biggest techie tease? Give us your thoughts below.
