RE: HsiuCheng, “iPhone6 is coming up!” – Too much love for IPHONE6
iPhone 6 (Source: thefusejoplin.com)
In her blog, HsiuCheng carelessly boasts about the newly launched iPhone 6 and optimistically predicts a healthy future for it in the highly competitive smartphone market. Boy, was she wrong.
To begin with, her statement that both the camera and screen resolution improved on the iPhone 6 is false when it is put in relative terms. Due to the fact that the smartphone industry is such a competitive one, it no longer makes sense for firms to assert that there is a new & improved camera, or a crisper screen resolution compared to an older model when there are other existing smartphones in the market prior to its launch which contain the same, or if not better features (such as the LG G3 or the HTC One M8).
Secondly, Apple, in my personal opinion, took the wrong approach when it decided on the larger screen size for its 6th generation of iPhones. In a way, this meant that Apple abandoned its differentiation strategy as iPhones have always been known to differ in size compared to many of the recently popular smartphones which have been bigger. One may argue that Apple’s decision to create a larger screen was to satisfy the significant amount of demand in the current smartphone market for a decently large phone. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this intention except that… the iPhone 6 is not the first product to be positioned in the minds of consumers in the market of large screen smartphones. Samsung dominated that sector of the market when it first launched the Note line. According to Ries and Trout, if a product is not going be first, it then must find an unoccupied position in which it can be first for it to be successful; unfortunately, this was not an approach which Apple decided to take.
Moreover, the future for the iPhone is even looking darker due to the “repositioning the competition” tactics taken on my other dominating firms after reports surfaced that the iPhone 6+ was bendable in consumers’ pockets. Look at the picture below to see how firms such as Samsung and LG are using iPhone 6’s weakness to convince consumers to view Apple in a different way.
Repositioning the competition (Source: indiatimes.com)
Conclusion? I am sorry to tell you this, Ms. Cheng, but Apple did not catch any customer hearts this time around 🙁
SOURCE
HsiuCheng Lin’s Blog – “IPHONE6 IS COMING UP!” – https://blogs.ubc.ca/hsiuchenglin/
WORKS CITED
Ladage, R. (2014). This is Why iPhone 6 is the Biggest Fail of the Year!. [online] www.indiatimes.com. Available at: http://www.indiatimes.com/
Quickmba.com, (2014). Porter’s Generic Strategies. [online] Available at: http://www.quickmba.com/
Quickmba.com, (2014). Product Positioning. [online] Available at: http://quickmba.com/marketing/
Smith, E. (2014). iPhone 6 vs Galaxy Note 3. [online] Load the Game. Available at: http://www.loadthegame.com/
The Fuse Joplin, (2014). iPhone 6 vs. Nexus 5 – Hardware Configuration, Software and Battery Life Comparison – The Fuse Joplin. [online] Available at: http://thefusejoplin.com/2014/