Apple's Minimalist iPhone Marketing: Let the Buzz Do the Work

According to Google News, there were 6,099 news articles mentioning Apple's (AAPL) iPhone yesterday. That's up 209 from Tuesday when we started tracking the number.

For anyone trying to reproduce our results, it's important that when you search Google News, you click the menu heading that says, "Last day" on the left hand side. The default, at least on my account, is to give you all the articles in the last month, which is pushing 9,000. Also, I try to measure the number at the same time each day, which I've arbitrarily chosen to be 9:45 am EDT.

Interestingly, if you do a Google News search for iPhone on blogs over the past day, you get 5,813, which is pretty close to the main stream news number. I would have thought that the blog number would be much higher.

The most interesting article I read about the iPhone Tuesday was this one from USA Today that noted that iPhone mania was nearing a fever pitch, with people planning to camp out at Cingular and Apple stores to get them next week. That contrasted significantly with the Boston Globe article yesterday morning that opined that price and network speed would limit iPhone sales. Yet as they say in marketing, there is no bad publicity, and the iPhone is certainly gaining its share.

Reuters has a very good article talking about how much value Apple (AAPL) has gotten from its rather minimalist iPhone ads, which are essentially just quick iPhone demos set to music.

The bottom line: letting the device speak for itself is doing more than any hard sell ad campaign would.

AAPL 1-yr chart

Comments

[Malkiel:]

It's not like Apple isn't doing anything to advertise: over the last two weeks I've seen more ads on cable tv for iphone than for almost any other single product. I think the visually slick and tasteful ads will have contributed to the buzz among people who were more tv-oriented than web-oriented...

2007 Jun 21 11:13 AM