Apple is now in Cook’s Era and the latest announcement campaign presented to be kind of unexpected. However, to iPhone 5c, most people’s first reaction was rather shocked than happily surprised.
iPhone 5c can be consider as a iPhone 5 just with a different shell. Actually, aside from the battery and minor changes, functionalwise, there is really no much difference between these two products. However, in terms of marketing strategy, iPhone 5c replaced iPhone 5 completely given the fact that the latter has suspend production for good.
Therefore, iPhone 5c is not as the previous rumour saying as Iphone 5 Cheap, rather it’s a iPhone 5 with crying profit. Personally, I think the colorful cases of iPhone 5c would be the most attractive to normal female consumers. These potential buyers don’t care much about Apple as the value behind the brand, they just blindly follow whatever is in trend. In other wards, Apple now is consuming its brand value rather than accumulating. People who follows the newest trend includes both female and male. There people are not the core consumers for digital, high tech products as in the past days; in fact, they are a lot less sensitive to functionality and capacity of a product compared to the real “understanding” apple users. However, we must admit that these people as a lot more consumer power since they are a such big group.
Thus, Apple finally step in front of both major consumer group and core consumer groups by announcing two similar product at the same time.
Nevertheless, I don’t think this is a perfect solution. Although 5C satisfied many of the needs from major consumers and get more revenue out of their pocket, it did suffer the loss of many invisible capital that were once highly valued by core consumers such as being high-end, stylish etc. And this loss is counting.