Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

160 BRAND RELEVANCE
silos confused the market as well as the Sony organization.
Worse, another silo, Sony Music, was more concerned with
avoiding piracy than with the success of the new digital product
and inhibited access to a broad array of music, leading to the use
of the cumbersome uploading process.
Apple too was not without premature products. One of the
most visible was Apple ’ s Newton, a personal digital assistant
introduced in 1993 when John Scully was CEO. It was designed
to manage schedules and a name list, support note taking using
a human writing recognition system, and a variety of other
tasks. Despite terrifi c introductory marketing, the product failed
and was killed when Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997. The
Newton was priced high, was both unreliable and sluggish, and
had a hard - to - read screen. If the product had waited for only
two years for the technology to improve and the design to be
made more reliable, it would probably have been a success. In
1996 Palm, with more advanced technology and a less ambitious
product vision, came out with the PalmPilot, a simpler PDA
that was a resounding success.
In one of the most remarkable strategic decisions, Jobs
decided to have Apple become a retailer, not just a seller of
product but a chain of stores that would represent the Apple
brand, present and communicate the products, and create a
more intimate relationship with its customers. The decision,
which was widely criticized, was based in part on an observation
that existing retailers would not or could not represent the
Apple products and brand in an authentic manner. The Apple
Store, opened in May 2001, confounded skeptics by surpassing
GAP as achieving the fastest growth of any retailer — in
three years it was doing $ 1 billion and in fi ve it was exceeding
$ 4 billion. By 2010 there were over three hundred stores in
ten countries.
The stores are clean, elegant, and spacious and located in
prime, high - traffi c areas. They include “ genius bars ” at which
technical help hangs out, theaters for presentations, studios