The last couple of days are big days for Apple. Apple has launched its new iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c, and announced it has sold over 9 million in the first three days. It nearly doubles the 5 million sales of the iPhone 5, which was launched last year. The successful sales of iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c are contributed by an improvement in the way of marketing, rather than an improvement in technology. Why this works?

As the criticism says the smartphone market has already been highly saturated. From the last year, more and more people decide to buy an Android phone instead of an iPhone. Comparing to the longstanding black and white iPhones, customers can get more choices by selecting from Androids. Also, the new features added in the iPhone 5 didn’t make any big differences from iPhone 4s. People even made jokes about the length increase of the iPhone 5, and predicted what iPhone20 would look like.

However, iPhone 5s/5c is more successful than Apple’s previous model. It’s not because iPhone 5s/5c upgrades its processor from generation 6(A6) to generation 7(A7/M7), or has a larger storage. It’s just because it looks better. In other words, it’s more physically appealing to the customers. For people like me, who have limited technology knowledge can barely tell the difference between an A7 chip and an A6, or A5 chip, but I can certainly tell the difference between a color of blue and black. Therefore, to a “visual” customer, the colorful design of the new iPhones definitely adds much value to the product. When Apple has nothing to do with its hardware upgrades, “for the colorful” is a bright way to be attractive.

From the textbook we learned that marketing has an enormous impact to our society. The influence would be in a good way if the marketing strategy is social-orientated, for instance, by holding ideas about social responsibility or sustainable growth, providing positive sense to public to contribute the society. However, some marketing are criticized as being unethical based on the bad effects causing by inappropriate contents or expressions.

The recent event, “The Science of Sexuality”, held by the Vancouver Science World has received some public criticism. Two of their three print ads have been removed from showing at bus stops around Vancouver for being considered as too racy. Although the three presented ads deliver simple and brilliant ideas which perfectly match the Science World “Now You Know” advertising campaign, the marketer should think twice about the impact before publish the ads to the public. As Science World is a place where parents want to bring their kids to go, parents would be more sensitive to what their kids will think if they see the ads. Even if kids are not the main target for the event, we have responsibilities to protect them from erotic and violent information.

Below are the three ads, and the left and the middle are the two banned from bus stops.

Here is another example. Many young ladies find they are offended by the recent back-to-school ads from Mic Mac Mall. The ads featured illustrations of young girls with lines “My favourite class? Shop!” and “Social studies? Does posting my new boots on Facebook count?”  To a certain degree the ads trumpet vanity, comparison, and the pursuit of the material rather than the spiritual. Some people said the ads reinforced gender stereotypes of young ladies only interested in shopping and not education.

Following are the back-to-school ads from Mic Mac Mall:

To sum up, besides finding ways to increase the profit and sales, marketers should consider more about how to enrich the society with their marketing campaign.

References:

http://globalnews.ca/news/780263/sexy-science-world-ads-banned-from-bus-stops/

http://globalnews.ca/news/797585/mic-mac-mall-apologizes-for-controversial-back-to-school-ads/