“Apple Inc’s Tuesday launch was a marketing extravaganza stuffed full of gadgets, corporate hyperbole and celebrities of every stripe,” Christina Farr and Jennifer Saba report for Reuters. “One thing was missing: the ‘i’ in front of the Watch.'”
“The company that spends hundreds of millions of dollars marketing and advertising its gizmos does not do things without careful deliberation,” Farr and Saba report. “Some branding experts say Apple chose that foreshortened appellation both to distinguish its first new device in four years and send a message to the public that it was moving into new territory.”
“Marketing chief Phil Schiller once said in court that Apple’s strategy, which spends hundreds of millions of dollars on ads, is to ‘make the product the biggest and clearest thing in advertising,'” Farr and Saba report. “It is a new era,” said Ellen Leanse, a brand strategist and former senior Apple executive. ‘It was a highly confident move that signals, pardon the pun, watch us… It would have been trite to call it the iWatch. It would have been looking backwards,’ she added. ‘This could pave a new path for a product family’ like the Macintosh.”
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