Apple Inc (AAPL)

[louismg]

Behind the Curtains of Apple Marketing to Enterprise

I had a meeting this afternoon with a group that assists companies in reaching the highest levels of corporations for marketing purposes, and one of the women I spoke with talked about working with Apple before they launched the XServe.

When approaching a CIO or Senior VP of Technology at any F500 firm, when you bring up Apple, they immediately close their train of thought, spouting words like "incompatible", "not standard" and "expensive".

She suggested that in order to reach the highest management in the enterprise, you start with technology, and then the brand - which is the opposite of Apple's usual strategy - saying... "What would you say if you had a server that could scale... What if you could offer 2 TB with standard RAID for only... etc. etc." and then the last page of the campaign would say, "What if I told you that you could buy this server from Apple?

She thought that bottoms-up approach would be much-more successful, and that pushing Apple in the enterprise based on brand will get the door slammed in your face.

So what did Apple do, she said?

They launched the XServe, with the tagline - "Apple Means Business".

C'est la vie.
- louismg