The Science of Marketing

Since Steve Jobs first introduced it a year and a half ago, I’ve been drooling over the iPhone. It’s taken that long (and a significant price cut) for me to justify the purchase and swap wireless carriers, but alas, I finally got mine Saturday morning – and I haven’t put it down for more than a few minutes since. It’s a technological marvel, going well beyond phone, well beyond PDA, well beyond media player. And Apple was masterful in building anticipation, getting people talking and generating demand. The engineering and marketing achievements have been covered to death, so I won’t go there. What amazed me even more was the feat of synchronization that the company engineered on its way to the iPhone 3G’s massive launch on July 11th. It was more than a feat of planning, it was a feat of inspiration.

First off, it’s important to understand the scale of the iPhone 3G’s launch – the company reportedly sold a million units in 21countries in 3 days. But these aren’t just "units", each iPhone is a well integrated, well packaged collection of cutting edge components and software. Design, development, testing, sourcing and manufacturing a million of these beauties in time for July 11th are enough to make any product manager cringe. Beyond the device itself, there’s Apple’s carrier partner AT&T, which had to build and operationalize a new network, America’s fastest 3G network – in time to support the finished iPhone 3G on launch day. Then there’s the third parties, the application developers, whose innovations unlock the true power of this new device. Come up with an idea, learn the developers toolkit, figure out how to write the application, work out the kinks – and do it all by launch day. Again, no small feat. Sure, there were a few glitches on day one, but Apple and AT&T were able to respond quickly and accelerate their pace of deployment over the weekend (proving their support plan, too, was well designed).

To pull this launch off, Apple had to develop and execute on a serious plan. I can only imagine the thought that went into bringing all of these moving parts together so the first million people in line could walk into the Apple Store or an AT&T retailer on the weekend of July 11th, and walk out with a shiny new iPhone 3G. It got me thinking about all the components that go into a good marketing launch – web content, collateral, presentations, media briefings and a healthy pre-launch buzz, for example. As marketers, I think we should all plan and execute at least one launch in our careers that inspires people and makes them wonder how we pulled it off. Have you had yours yet?

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