2. Marketing Strategy
2.A Strategic Overview
The primary worldwide marketing goal is simple and straightforward: establish Macintosh as the third industry standard product in the marketplace. The first two standard products are the Apple II(e) and the IBM-PC. This goal will not happen instantaneously. However, the marketing story must be in place at introduction.
Macintosh cannot and will not be "all things to all people" -- especially at time of introduction. Yet the dynamics of the industry warrant an extremely aggressive marketing program from the outset. It is our premise that we will only get to introduce this product once. We have an extraordinary product. We must surround that product with excellent service, support, applications software. In addition, it is of crucial importance that we communicate a believable and achievable marketing plan to our sales force and the public at time of introduction. Part of this plan will be real at introduction while a significant portion will occur in the following 3-9 months. As a "marketing driven" company we must focus on the entire album and not just a snapshot of introduction day.
Failing to establish Macintosh as the third standard product could significantly decelerate Apple's growth curve. IBM has taken away major pieces of our large office, medium office and small business segment sales. National Account penetration is a long term prospect. Without a successful introduction, the first-term trend appears irreversible given IBM's success in repositioning the IIe as a home/education product. Moving the PCS product line back into the mainstream business segment at this time appears to be an unreasonable proposition. Apple's attempt to create a two horse Apple/IBM race will fail if we are relegated to a <>2.B Product Positioning
Positioning is a concept that informs consumers about the relative qualities a product may have in contrast to its competition. It is based on another concept: that consumers apply hierarchical values to products. It is always dynamic and changing, and is most successful when proactive rather than reactive.
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Macintosh is an advanced personal productivity tool for knowledge workers. .......................................................................................................................
ADVANCED - Lisa Technology, our key competitive advantage, sets a new price/value standard. This is extremely important. We define Lisa Technology as its user interface software: pull down menus, windows, desktop metaphor, bitmapped graphics, integrated applications, and mouse all driven by a 32 bit 68000. The benefits of this technology are the reduction in learning time, the consistent user interface across applications, and the sharing of data across applications. Our competitive analysis states that neither IBM, nor anyone else, will be able to replicate Mac for 6-12 months. We strongly support the POSD claim that Lisa Technology represents the future direction in personal computing, for naive users as well as "experts".
PERSONAL - The product is designed to optimize personal performance at a desk environment. The product is 30% the size and weight of the PC. It can easily be transported from one work location to another. The typical knowledge worker spends 29% of his/her time in generic thought work" (from Booz-Allen). This statistic represents the analysis, problem solving, memo writing part of a knowledge worker's day. In many situations Macintosh will replace the pencil and paper method of generic thought work. The typical customer will use the product 1-3 hours/day. The product has not been optimized to "run a company" as in the large scale computation and manipulation of payrolls, inventories, or data bases. However, the product excels at local information processing including acting as a terminal to remote data bases. Apple's message will be that, 'Macintosh fits. On your desk and in your life."
PRODUCTIVITY TOOL - Like the Apple IIe and the IBM-PC, the product will increase the productivity of the knowledge worker at the desk. Standard generic productivity tools including word processing, spreadsheet, business graphics, data base/file management, communications and project scheduling will be available from third party developers. With new software written specifically for Macintosh coming from Lotus Development (1-2-3), Microsoft (MultiPlan, MultiChart, MultiWord, MultiFile), Software Publishing Corporation (PFS Series) and others, we will have an outstanding selection of powerful proven productivity tools. In addition, our Apple published applications, MacWrite, MacPaint and MacTerminal are excellent products. The competitive advantage of Macintosh over the PC or the IIe is the unique combination of brand name integrated productivity software with Lisa Technology. In this context we often speak of the product as a desk appliance. An appliance is defined as a "means to an end". The first desk appliance for knowledge workers was the telephone. Current generation personal computers with their 20-40 hour learning time cannot be called appliances. Appliances deliver great utility, are easy to learn and master, increase productivity, take up less space and are priced for personal (as opposed to shared) use. Macintosh, as a second generation desk appliance, offers unparalleled performance and value as a productivity tool.
KNOWLEDGE WORKERS - The knowledge worker has been carefully defined by Booz-Allen by POSD, and by many office automation consultants, and is demographically addressed in Section 2C of this PIP. Knowledge workers are professionally trained individuals who are paid to process information and ideas into plans, reports, analyses, memos, and budgets. They generally sit at desks. They generally do the same generic problem solving work irrespective of age, industry, company size, or geographic location. Some have limited computer experience -- perhaps an introductory programming class in college -- but most are computer naive. Their use of a personal computer will not be of the intense eight-hours-per-day-on-the-keyboard variety. Rather they bounce from one activity to another, from meeting to phone call, from memo to budgets, from mail to meeting. Like the telephone, their personal computer must be extremely powerful yet extremely easy to use. In general, their psychographic profile correlates very closely with SRI's Values And Lifestyles Study (VALS) group known as "achievers". Excluded from our definition of the knowledge worker are CEO's and secretaries/clerks. This target knowledge worker group maps directly into our corporate positioning Strategy with the tag line, "Soon there will be two kinds of people: those who use computers and those who use Apples."
Macintosh is an advanced personal productivity tool for knowledge workers. The product is not a "home computer" nor a K-12 "education computer" nor a large-scale fully networked office automation machine. The next two sections describe in detail the physical location of our target customer and the channels required to reach the customer.
2.C Target Markets
Knowledge workers use productivity applications in all of Apple's traditional market segments: business, education and home. In order of priority, Macintosh is horizontally targeted at knowledge workers in the following U.S. markets:
1. Medium Business (Sales > $5 million and <>
hey make up the largest group of knowledge workers and potential Macintosh users:
Knowledge Workers Potential Macintosh Users
Large Business 11.4 million 5.2 million
Medium Business 15.6 million 8.6 million
Small Business 9.6 million 5.1 million
TOTAL 36.6 million 18.9 million
Potential Macintosh users, for example, include financial analysts, sales managers, accountants, insurance and real estate agents, stockbrokers, social scientists, lawyers, personnel managers, administrators, planners, and exclude, for example, all secretaries, typists, clerical workers, retail sales workers.
Personal productivity users in the three segments of the business market share certain needs because of their common applications, and have some different needs because of the size and nature of their businesses. Below we have ranked the needs of the three business segments:
The college marketplace provides another large pool of knowledge workers. There are 3,300 colleges and universities in the United States with approximately 11 million students. Besides needing productivity and educational software and being very price sensitive, this segment insists on state of the art technology. Macintosh's consistent user interface and mouse-based technology is a big plus here. Apple has traditionally been strong in the education market. Through the Macintosh-initiated University Consortium Program, we expect that Macintosh will be the centerpiece of long-term agreements with universities wishing to use the entire Apple line of products.
We expect a large number of Macintosh's to enter the home/home-business market because of the price/value relationship and strength of Apple's retail distribution channel. Based an results from the 1981 Census, Apple II Owners' Survey and Apple's Wave II Brand Share Study, we estimate the market for high-end home systems (> $500) is approximately 25.8 million households. This market wants literacy/education/entertainment software, productivity software, reliability, price/value, ease of use and expendability. It is certain that Macintosh will be an extremely attractive product in this segment. However, we will not attempt to position the product in any way as a "home" computer.
The scientific/industrial matrix is composed of 2 million engineers, scientists and technicians. Personal computers are used in this segment for general desktop purposes (48%), data acquisition and control (40%), and computer aided graphics and drafting (12%). Macintosh will focus its marketing efforts on the productivity applications of the 48% of engineers and scientists requiring a general desktop computer. These professionals need development languages such as FORTRAN, Pascal and C, general purpose formula solvers (TK!Solver) and statistical programs, standard communication interfaces (RS-232, RS-422, IEEE-488) and mass storage in the 5 - 1 0 Mb range.
The following pie chart breaks out Macintosh's anticipated US sales for calendar year 1984 by market segment:
Based on Industry unit sales volume projected by the Apple Markets model and on Apple unit sales volume projected in FY 1984 Business Plan, Macintosh and the other Apple products will fit into the various market segments as follows:
3. Product Line Strategy
3.A STRATEGIC OVERVIEW
The design goal for the Macintosh product is to develop a low cost, powerful personal computer with Lisa Technology. All basic requirements will be built into the product thus eliminating the need for costly internal hardware slots. The value of the machine is delivered via "software slots"; that is, application software developed under the influence of our open architecture development environment and our 64K Lisa Technology ROM.
The product development Strategy for Macintosh is twofold:
*Provide the core set of hardware, peripherals, and system software at an extraordinary price/value;
*Stimulate leading third-party developers to rewrite their best applications for Macintosh, as well as write new applications, taking advantage of the Macintosh user interface and graphics capabilities.
This is accomplished by establishing a large installed base of Macintoshes and by providing a rich development environment and good marketing programs that increase the attractiveness of developing products for Macintosh.
The objectives of the Macintosh data communications Strategy are to:
*Provide users access to information stored in mainframe databases in a low cost, effective way;
*Meet the buying objections of large corporate customers for useful communications with IBM mainframe computers.
The Strategy is to develop a simple terminal emulation package for VT-100, VT-52, and TTY to be available at or soon after launch, and to combine this software with existing Apple hardware products to enable 3270 communications (see product dictionary for detailed description). We are continuing to work with the POSD data communications group to pursue more optimal and cost-effective datacomm solutions for all Apple CPUs.
The objectives of our mass storage and networking strategies are to:
*Provide mass storage products to meet the needs of Macintosh customers;
*Provide flexible network and server solutions in a market environment where no clear standards exist;
*Meet the buying objectives of large corporate customers "requiring" networks.
These strategies are under development and will be discussed as soon as the products have been approved.
Details on specific products and their availability are in the sections that follow.
Team
The team scribe is Barbara Koalkin with assistance from everyone in Macintosh, especially Bob Belleville, Director of Engineering.
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