Monday 14 December 2020

How Apple Changed Advertising?

 

It was 1983, Computer has left the mammoth-sized air-conditioned rooms and was becoming a part of households and office desks. IBM was the major giant that held almost all the Cards in the extensively growing personal computer market.

At that time Apple came up with an Idea of Macintosh. A personal computer which took the word “personal” seriously. The company was in disarray, Apple III was a failure. IBM has gained the position of the market leader. Steve Jobs has started to lose control of the Company. John Sculley became the Apple Chief Executive Officer.

Macintosh was an important product for Apple. It not only has to save Apple from drowning but also gain back the market share.

The management prepared for the Macintosh in Launch in January 1984 and hired Chiat/Day for the advertising campaign.

Chiat /Day wanted to achieve the following

1.        The advertisement to be futuristic.

2.        The advertisement should represent the company rather than the product

3.        To create Brand Awareness for a technical product which caters to the masses.

 

How they achieved the goal.

They achieved these goals by combining the elements of literature, sci-fi, consumerism and individualism.  Ridley Scott was hired to direct the advertisement, whose Sci-fi movies Aliens and Blade Runner were on their way to becoming classics.  The advertisement has a budget of $650,000 and the director used real skinhead to act as extras in it. He even paid people to shave their head and join the crew of extras.

Here is the advertisement:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I

 

The Advertisement starts with a group of skinheads, marching into a big hall where the Big Brother is preaching propaganda. While the scene is interlayered with an athlete in red, running past the marching skinheads with a sledgehammer in her hand.

She reaches the hall, where the droids are watching the Big Brother. She swings the sledgehammer at the screen breaking the screen. The shot cuts and the tagline appear

“1984 won’t be like “1984” ”

The advertisement depicted a scene from the George Orwell’s famous Dystopian Novel 1984. Which is why the emphasis on 1984.  The athlete in the sledgehammer, acts as a disruptive element in the Order. Thus, act as a revolutionary force.

 

Over the years, the advt. is scrutinized by experts of literature and advertising. The imagery depicted in it has been defined in more ways than one.  The common meaning derived out of it in that IBM is the Big Brother, who do not want to innovate whereas Macintosh (represented by the athlete with a sledgehammer) is the breaker of monotony and would help you as an individual and stand out in the public.

However, the advertisement never show the image of Macintosh. The message of the launch of Macintosh is only presented at the end. It was too dark compared to the advertisements at that time.  The advertisement didn’t have a clear “call to action.”

For these reasons the Management of Apple didn’t like the idea. In-fact it asked the agency to sell all the super bowl slots that has been bought by the agency.

 The Advertisement was able to create enough buzz to sell  $155 million worth of Macintoshes the first few days.

 

How it changed advertising?

The Apple 1984 advert is a landmark advertisement.  The aim for the advertisement was to spread brand awareness, create interest in the mind of the viewers and tease them with the product. It didn’t have an action plan.

The advertisement instead promised a revolution, when the product will be launched. A wave of change.  It used the theme of an individual against the conventional society norms.

The advertisement changed everything about the conventional advertising. It represented the idea of the product rather than the product itself. During the show reel =, it never ask the viewer to buy the new product. Instead it makes a promise for the future.

It presented commercial as an art form rather than a means of selling a product. It showed that a commercial can stand for more than the product and can help personify a brand. The advertisement helped solidify Apple’s image as a rule breaker, innovator and human.

Apple legacy…

Soon after the launch of Macintosh, the board fired Steve Jobs in 1985, and the board started playing safe, introducing very few creative products.  Thus, leading to a collapse until they hired back Steve Jobs. Apple soon launched the slew of innovative products such as iPod, iPhone, iPad and iwatch.

Apple soon became the differentiator it was meant to be and face of digital revolution in the 21st century. It is now the world’s largest tech company and also one of the most valuable companies on planet earth. This became possible, because some advertising agency thought to make a creative advertisement that represent the Apple values rather than a particular Apple product. The company has strived to remain on that path since then.

 

                    

Sunday 18 October 2020

How to build your personal brand through marketing?

Introduction

Whether you are business or an individual, you are faced with a continuous desire to be known in the world. You can only be known for your work and ethics. You need to convince people that you or your product have the qualities that they are seeking.  This where Marketing comes into play. There are various methods used in the process of Marketing.

However, with the advent of internet. A whole new branch of marketing has evolved that uses the conventional and non-conventional methods to attract attention from people and thereby convert them into loyal customers/followers.  In the next steps we will learn about the:

·         The fundamentals of marketing

·         Digital marketing vs. Traditional marketing.

·         CATT Marketing Funnel

·         Integrated Digital Marketing

·         Personal Branding: MassTrust Blueprint

 

Marketing Fundamentals

Marketing is everything a business do to attract new customers and serve the existing ones. Marketing serves as a tool to create demand for its product offering.  Marketing helps in achieving the main goal of an Organization, i.e. revenue generation.  

There are four pillars to Marketing, popularly known as the 4Ps of Marketing.   These are Product, Price, Place and Promotion.



Product: The main offering by any organization or individual through which it aims to add value to the consumer.  The Marketer should focus on creating a product that should cater to the customer needs. 

Your product must solve a customer problem.   However, the customer should perceive its usefulness in their lives.

For Example, Customer has a need for soap that can be used in cleaning clothes and makes them smell better.  Unilever, first recognized this problem and invented washing powder.  Today Unilever is a multimillion company.

 

Price- You may consider price as a measure of the value the product aims to provide to the value. The function of marketing is to set the appropriate price for the value provided by the company.  Remember, Price is the perceived value of the product, rather than the actual value of the product.

The gap between the perceived value and the actual price of the product is your profit.  The more valuable the product is to the customer, the better you will be able to sell it. Remember you can sell a product only at its perceived value.

If you want to achieve the goal of earning Rs 1 Crore, You can achieve it either by selling your product for Rs10 to ten lakh people. Or you could increase the perceived value of the product and sell it to fewer people.



You will be willing to pay higher price of BMW and Mercedes than for a Tata Nano, because you perceive the higher value of the BMW.

 

 

Place- The accessibility of the product to the consumer is of utmost importance.  Imagine you make a useful product, priced it at the best rate and you are promoting it through the roof.  However, the customer has no way to access your product. Your product won’t be sold even if the customer wants to buy it.

Thankfully, there are multiple channels to achieve it.  Product and service can be delivered through physical as well as non-physical mediums. The nature of your product is one of the biggest factors that contribute to the selection of this factor.

The channels also act as promotional tools. Have you ever seen a CocaCola delivery truck zooming across town, delivering . They could have delivered the Coke Cola cartons in simple trucks. But they pain the side of the truck and turn it into a big moving billboard. This also helps them to attract eyeballs

For Example, I have taken up an internship program with Digital Deepak, It is an internship program which is purely Non- physical. The mode of delivery is internet there are no physical attributes to the product. However, it is of great value to me.

Promotion-

Making a valuable product is not enough, nor putting an attractive price on the product.  Even if you have made it conveniently reachable to the customer.  You won’t be able to sell it until you communicate it to the potential buyers.

There are many ways to communicate your message to the audience. In many cases you want the audience to respond to your message. This response may come in the form of attention or sale.  

     

The progression of internet has led to a new channel of communication, A new channel of delivery and a whole new range of products/ ideas. Hence, Marketing also evolved to cater to the digital platform.  Hence, Digital Marketing came into existence.

 

Traditional Marketing Vs Digital Marketing



According to a TRAI report , there were 74.3 Crore internet users in India  in March 2020.  The user base in India is growing. However, The traditional advertising mediums such as TV, Newspaper, and Radio have a wider audience reach than the internet.

 

The choice of media depends on the product. A generic product such as washing powder or toothpaste require a wide audience set. The marketer will find it cheaper to advertise the product on Television or in a newspaper.  The brand awareness is also not measurable in the traditional mediums.

Digital Marketing allows for a personal and customizable advertising targeting only the prospective leads. Making it easier for the marketer, to calculate Return on Investment (ROI)  of advt. spent over the internet.

You can also easily target the audience of your particular niche through direct response marketing.

Direct response marketing is a marketing technique in which the user is urged to take some action. The action can be providing you email ID, subscribing to newsletter or calling a provided number.  This type of marketing helps the marketer to funnel out the serious buyer, which would ultimately lead to a conversion or sale.

 

Digital Marketing can be understood through CATT model

 

According to the CATT model, you can generate income through Content that gets Attention and creating Trust  that will ultimately lead to Transaction.

The formulae for wealth creation is

Wealth=n*CATT




n(Niche): There are multiple categories of business through which you can operate. You must select your niche carefully. The niche must not be so obscure that there are limited customers,  Your talent must cater to the market  in the particular niche.

Your niche is in fact the convergence of three things Your passion, Your talents and your Market.   Thus, helping you to grow the market exponentially.  

 


C(Comtent)- Your content is the central part of your digital Marketing Strategy. The content should be useful to your selected niche   Content can be in multiple formats such as Blog Posts, Video, live webinars, Lead Magnets etc.

A(Attention):  The purpose of content is to grasp attention. A new customer will only convert when they pay attention to the product or services being offered. Consumer pays attention only on those things that are of interest to them.  Attention can be driven through SEO, Paid advertising,  Social Media and other methods

T(Trust): Trust is created when you personalise your message, the best way to create trust is to get testimonials from your current satisfied customers. Trust is created when a person gets familiarise with the product. Marketing Automation, personalised email marketing campaigns and retargeting the audience will lead to trust building

T(Transaction): The final conversion step where  the consumer pays you in exchange of the products and services provided by you.   This is the ultimate step in the process of digital marketing.

 

Integrated Digital Marketing.

Nothing exists in isolation, especially marketing. To succeed in Digital Marketing the combined step s to succeed in Digital Marketing.  You must be able to use both paid and non paid  methods to drive attention to your content.

Your Content must be able to add some value to each individual in your audience.  You drive attention to it using social media, paid advertising, and SEO.  The content helps in building trust and ultimately converts them from promising leads to a satisfied customer.




 Personal Branding

Your brand represents the value that you stand for. People recognize you as a brand when they will start trusting you.  Your name is your personal brand. For example, Elon Musk is a bigger brand than the companies he started. Similarly Baba Ramdev is a bigger brand than Patanjali.  Establishing a personal brand will help you to become an influencer. People will automatically Trust any new venture established by you because you have gained Mass Trust.

You can become the brand ambassador of your own company and promote these companies to establish a brand.

How to establish a Personal Brand?

Learn: You learn a new skill, through concepts, facts and procedure, You need to understand the concepts, remember the facts and practice the procedure.  You can learn a new skill to achieve

Work: Implement what you have learned through work. Try to incorporate all the facts and learning to implement it in the real world. You achieve authority in a particular subject.

Blog: Write about what you have learned and experienced through work.  Your content becomes unique when you write about your personal experience with the work and the learnings.

Consult: Now you can start consulting other people on the subject matter.  Your expertise on the subject matter can become an offering for  other people who might need your skillset to implement in in their own business.

Mentor:  Mentoring is consulting on a large scale. You can teach them the skillsets that you have learned through Working, Blogging and consulting businesses. Mentoring helps you understand your content and skill in a much better way than the above three methods.

Startup:  You can start a new business and make use of your skillset and sell your product or services through various methodology. You created a new brand from developing your own personal brand.


 

The process mentioned above is called the Mass Trust blueprint for building your personal brand.  You have to continuously get involved in learning, Working, Blogging, Consulting and Mentoring to build your brand and remain competent in the environment.

Tuesday 6 October 2020

My version 2.0 and the future me

 

Vibhor Agarwal is an Entrepreneur and Best Selling Author of the Sci – Fi series The Avantar.  He owns a Marketing and Brand strategy firm VirtualistVibhor.  Over the years. The firm has helped many small and medium businesses to gain international recognition.

Vibhor Agarwal is also one of the main proponents for the reading initiative in India. An avid reader himself, he started an online Book library. The library helps people to cultivate reading habit. It provides a reader a social community and lets them share the reading list and can collect points, once they finish a book.

As a marketer, he has worked with companies like Amazon, Flipkart, Nestle, and many more. His Ted Talk about the Rational Consumer Brain, which he gave at the Princeton Business School has garnered over a million views. In 2025, he was also listed among the Top 50 most Influential people in the world List.

 Meanwhile HBO and Netflix are fighting over the right for the book series. HBO has already hired Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad fame) for the project. While Netflix is planning to cast Dev Patel and Sean Bean for the cast of the Show.

 But above all, he is a philanthropist and runs several schools for the underprivileged. However, these schools are a little bit different from the typical schools. The teaching methodology in these schools let the children, to explore their creativity.   There are more than twenty schools that are being run by Vibhor Agarwal’s aide.

 Vibhor Agarwal wakes up at 5 A.M   and runs for 5 Km on a daily basis.  He then writes for three to four hours. Goes to Work, Comes back at 8 P.M.  Reads and Edit his work and Goes to sleep at midnight. This is his Typical work Routine. Vibhor Agarwal lives in Pune with his wife and two kids.

Saturday 12 November 2011

The Introduction

This is my first blog post so i am  kind of anxious to write  all the stuff' sorry for the errors.
hello to all my readers ;my blog is about how the youth of new India see itself  and other happenings around it self through a stained glass  that symbolises  all the evils of the society. but then it is a mirror it will reflect the true world .
As i know how being a 18 year old boy  who is just going to start his college life in few months wnt to see the world in that stained mirror because i am also one of them
I am Vibhor agarwal and i am searching for some answers ,and for a answer we need questions
 So my first ques. is why are our brains are always screwed up by a pesky disease called fear?
The answer to it might not be an easy one but all of us has fears for example our politicians have a fear of loosing their positions in the state ,rich has a fear of loosing its wealth ,we have a fear of  not gtting good mrks .
the reason to all such  fears is wrongful deeds  and mistakes done knowingly
as my mother always puts that the man with pure heart never fears & a courageous man is always truthfull..