“If Sony were offered 24 million unit sales on their previous flagship, the Xperia Z1, I’m sure Sony would be happy with those numbers,” Ewan Spence writes for Forbes. “HTC would bite your arm off if the HTC One M8 handset could get even half of those numbers. Estimates show that Apple’s iPhone 5C has sold over 24 million handsets, in which case why does every mention of the 5C go down as a failure for Apple?”
“It’s important to look back at the period before the reveal of the iPhone 5C. Analysts and industry watchers were expecting Apple to release a ‘budget’ model. This would increase the volume of sales, it would increase the margins available to operators and retailers, and it would allow Apple to enter new markets with a cut-price machine that these markets were built around. In the church of market share, the only way for Apple to gather more users was to sell more devices at a lower price. Apple has never really cared for market share numbers,” Spence writes. “It’s also important to realise that the mainstream media who had created the story of Apple ‘needing’ a budget handset decided to force the iPhone 5C into their narrative of a cheap handset. That was never the role of the 5C.”
“The iPhone 5C made a huge amount of sense when it was launched, and it continues to be a strong seller in Apple’s portfolio. Apple has also addressed the carrier subsidy issue by making the iPhone 5C 8 GB variant. There’s no question in my mind that the 5C was the right thing to do, and it is nowhere near the ‘failure’ that the media continues to label it,” Spence writes. “The question for me is this. Why could Apple not get this story out through the usual press channels? Why has the myth of the 5C being a failure taken root? Apple quickly lost control of the public narrative, and while the iPhone 5C continues to sell amazingly well, it still has the smell of failure around it.”
MacDailyNews Take: This would be because Apple’s so-called PR department is woefully inept at anticipating potential problems and combating them when they arise (Antennagate, Final Cut Pro X, Maps, etc.).
“In a sense, the iPhone 5C is a failure of Apple to tell the correct story around the handset,” Spence writes. “The 5C was a small part in the strong brand that is the iPhone, and iPhone as a whole could absorb the disappointment and the ‘failure’ tag the 5C now carries. Apple cannot afford the same mistakes to be made with the launch of the iWatch and lose control of the story that Apple wishes to tell about the new wearable.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Here’s hoping Tim Cook’s new, more open Apple has somebody ready in PR who has crisis management experience and an actual plan prior to the company’s next major product launch which, we guarantee, will be accompanied by tons of FUD.
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Apple looking to externally hire ‘friendlier, more approachable’ PR chief – June 9, 2014
Apple’s PR head Katie Cotton to retire – May 7, 2014