One aspect of Apple’s creativity – apart from it’s products of course, has been the way they handle their advertising. Simplicity, uncluttered approach and a clear articulation of the product benefit has been the hallmark of all their ads. An ad for iPhone highlights the app store and what it can do. The ad for a Mac highlights features like iLife or Magsafe adaptor and articulates the consumer benefit. This aspect continues even with the way they approach their website. The website has a traffic rank of 63 in Alexa (with India featuring among the Top 5 countries from which it gets traffic!)- pretty high I would say for a company that has such a small share of the PC market gloabally. It’s a different story with iPod and iPhone of course, but what strikes me is the consistency of approach across the Apple website.
Each product or application featured in the website it boiled down to it’s single biggest feature and the benefit thereof. The descriptor then becomes the headline or the hook. For example, the new iPod Shuffle is ‘the first music player that talks to you’. While there are several other features (size of a key) the VoiceOver feature takes precedence. The product page crams in a lot of information but in a clean, simple manner.
The rest of the products follow the same grammar:
iMac: The all-in-one for everyone
Safari: See the web in a whole new way
Keyboard: Versatility sculpted in aluminium
Mac Mini: Faster. Greener. Still Mini.
Macbook Pro: Precisions, precisions, precisions
iPod Touch: The funnest iPod ever.
It’s a great learning on how to approach advertising – specially the print kind. Interrogate the product until it confesses, fix the most important aspect of the product, extrapolate the benefit and then express it in a simple, pithy manner.