Marketing Mix

A pple has a great variety of products. It produces many things, beginning from sound speakers to complicated computers with an easy interface to understand. I decided to show the full variety of Apple products below:

• Mac (Computer)

• IPod (musical digital player)

• TV

• Computer Monitors

• Periphery ( Mouse, Keyboard)

• Sound speakers and Sound systems

• Other computer and music accessories

• Software and Multimedia

All Apple products are targeted at different groups of people. In order to keep up-to-date, Apple does a lot of marketing research, in order to find out exactly what their customers want. Most of their products are targeted at the young group of people, which I’m going to Also, all Apple products have their own brand names, which have a big impact on their customers. The main aim of this company is to provide people with the products they want, which are also affordable. Several years ago, Apple only concentrated on two main products: computer and software. Nowadays, with the newest technology Apple got involved into different areas of the market, not only selling all types of different products, but designing, developing software for them and even doing packaging. At the moment, Apple is almost the only electronic company in the world, which designs, develops, sells and even does packaging, offering a very high quality of the products. It turns out to be much easier to control the quality of the products and service, when almost all processes are done by one company.

Segmentation

Different companies segment and brand their products in different ways. There are many factors, which have an effect on how the businesses segment their products. The main factors are given bellow:

• Income (E.g. Pensioners are not tend to spend all their pension ob buying new technological goods. Therefore, Apple and many other companies don’t concentrate their products on this particular group of people, as they are less likely to buy their products.)

• Social class (E.g. unemployed workers or people with very low incomes, like cleaners might not be targeted by Apple, as their products are relatively expensive).

• Gender (E.g. Some of Apple products are pink colours and have ‘girly’ design)

• Geographical region (E.g. for example Apple and many other companies have different models of their products designed specially for the Asian markets.)

• Amount if use (e.g. some people only use a mobile phone to call and don’t need any other functions, but the price is very important for them. For these customers mobile phone makers are tending to make budget phones without camera, colour display and all ‘extra’ functions, so this helps to decrease the price and offer what a certain group of customers wants. For example, those people who don’t want to pay extra money for having a video function or colour display in their iPod can choose to buy iPod Shuttle, which is a budget model and doesn’t have all these functions.)

Branding

Branding is very important, because that’s what gives product a name and makes it unique. Customers pay premium price for it, because it give them an intangible benefits and satisfaction of the product. For example, those people who buy iPods not only want to buy a digital player to listen to the music, but look ‘cool’ as well, otherwise they would buy any other player available on the market. Design of Apple products and adverts promotes the image of a new product. Apple design is very different to the other similar products available on the market, and people are prepared to pay extra money, in order to become those lucky people who have a digital player with a unique design.