Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

158 BRAND RELEVANCE
It was a product that you only had to see once to appreciate — it
was simply cool and was clearly viewed as being used by
cool people.
The timing was right. Steve Jobs recognized that there was
a window of opportunity for the iPod. There was a need, the
competitive entries were seriously fl awed, and the combination
of Apple technology and new hardware options created an
opening. In particular, an inexpensive, 1.8 - inch hard drive
from Toshiba became available that could hold over one thousand
songs, a key enabling advance. In order to react fast to
the market and to access competencies in key areas, Apple
employed partners in the development process. 2 The team was
under the leadership of PortalPlayer, which provided the base
platform, and generated a product that included a stereo digital -
to - analog converter from Wolfson Microelectronics, a fl ash
memory chip from Sharp Electronics, a Texas Instruments interface
controller, and a power management integrated circuit from
Linear Technologies. Apple was not alone.
The introduction was embedded in a crazy amount of buzz. The
product was introduced into TV shows and movies without any
placement pay simply because it was cool. The power of the Apple
brand, having been revitalized by the distinctive iMac design that
appeared in 1998, only one year after Jobs returned to Apple from
his forced exile, was a crucial ingredient. The buzz and brand
were complemented by an effective marketing program.
Another critical component of success was the easy - to - use
iTunes application for organizing and listening to music on
computers. In April 2003 Apple introduced the iTunes store,
which allowed a user to buy (as oppose to steal) recorded songs
and later books, podcasts, and TV shows, and which itself was
a new category. Steve Jobs and his team accomplished what
seemed impossible. In addition to creating enabling software,
they pulled off the delicate task of getting the fi ve major music
companies to agree to sell single songs for 99 cents over the
Internet. In addition, the whole iTunes store operation was not