Apple Marketing and Diffusion of Innovation Theory
Apple has not only successfully attracted people to their products through the process of diffusion of innovation, but it has cemented the public’s willingness to confirm their choice and continue sticking by the company through cross diffusion. In other words, by bringing other companies into their fold, they have created a system by which if folks want to get the best out of an adjacent product, for instance Beats or Nike, they will stay with Apple. By partnering with these companies, folks are less to turn their back and switch to another company. Beats headphones and Nike Training Club are just two of the products that pair seamlessly with the iPhone. It is not that you can’t pair Beats headphones or a Nike Training program to an Android device, it is more the fact that you won’t get as stellar a performance out of the product.
Not to mention the situation of the green versus the blue bubble. Annie Zheng wrote in her article for Business Insiderthat “After more than a decade of using iPhones, I finally switched to Android — but I only lasted three days before switching back.”(1) When she writes, “Android users will likely scoff at the so-called ‘green bubble’ problem. I’m the first to admit that the idea that friends will not want to text you because you have [a] green bubble is ridiculous, [but] … It’s not as simple as everyone accepting the green bubbles.” The reason this strikes me as true has to do with the concept of diffusion of innovations, the process by which an innovation is communicated over time among the participants in a social system and then grows ever larger.
I purchased my first iPhone because I wanted to be able to FaceTime with my friends, something you can’t do without an Apple product. Most everyone I know has an iPhone. It is also a better platform for texting because it uses Apple’s proprietary iMessage system. iMessage is Apple’s instant messaging service for devices like iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Released in 2011 with iOS 5, iMessage lets users send messages, photos, stickers, and more between any Apple device over the Internet. If I left my iPhone behind and switched to a competitor, I wouldn’t be able to coordinate as easily with my social network.
Apple has dominated its market for well over a decade by understanding how innovations spread or diffuse through a population. It also cleverly works to retain that dominance by reinforcing an individual’s choice to confirm his or her adoption choice and continue with its products. As its share of the market fluctuates slightly, but generally holds at about 60%, the daily number of adopters is falling as a function of time and the limits of a finite number of consumers. Nevertheless, Apple ensures that its market share remains robust by making sure earlier adopters do not abandon the product by making the cost of defection high. When they bring companies like Beats and Nike onboard to pair with their devices, they are making sure that their users will have the best experiences on those platforms. Sure, you can switch and set it all up somewhere else, but it won’t perform as well as you have become accustomed to.
In 1962 Everett Rogers published his seminal work, “Diffusion of Innovations” (2) and even this many decades later, Apple remains true to that model. In marketing its products, especially the iPhone, Apple has, either knowingly or otherwise, relied on the principals found in the theory of diffusion of innovations. The results are stunning. On June 29, 2007, the first iPhone was released to the public (3) and although Android-, Blackberry-, and Windows- based competitors came to market by early 2010 to compete, iPhones still command almost 60% of the U.S. market share (4). Apple wisely pitched its iPhone marketing to innovators, the first group to get their hands on something. These people are generally willing to take risks and little needs to be done to appeal to them. Following them are the early adaptors who are more judicious in their choices but who are more socially forward than the later adaptors. The rest tend to follow in the fat part of the bell curve, which Rogers labels the early majority and the late majority. Finally, there are the so-called laggards. I feel comfortable placing myself in the early majority adopters of the iPhone. Zheng claims she has been using the iPhone “starting with the first iteration and continuing through the 3GS, 4S, 5S, and the 6S.” It sounds like she belongs in the early majority adopters as well. What she goes on to describe however is her experience with the last of the five stages in the adoption process that Rogers describes in his piece: confirmation/continuation. Simply put, Apple users carry on and are fully committed to avoid the green bubble and retain the magic of other platforms.
(1) https://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-vs-android-imessage-ios-switch-2018-12
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_iPhone
(4) http://www.androidized.com/android-vs-ios-market-share-in-2020/