Apple Inc. is a multinational company that deals in a wide range of tech services, products, accessories, software, and solutions. Creativity and innovation powers the company. The two manifest in the improvement of products and services the company offers every time there is a release. The extent of Apple’s portfolio necessitates both low and high involvement of consumers of its products and services. This is necessary for the company to continue to create and innovate products that consumers would find attractive. The Apple brand is widely recognised across all socioeconomic classes and has earned Apple customer loyalty, thus shielding the company from the competition. However, Apple cannot rely on the brand alone. As new companies like Samsung continue to acquire a significant portion of the technology market, Apple has no option but to have to continue to create and innovate to ensure that they do not lose their customers to companies that offer products of almost similar quality but at less expensive prices.
The purpose of this essay is to look into the role of the understanding of memory on Apple Incorporated’s strategies for product promotion. There are different variations of the term memory. One definition of the term is that it is the representation of real-world objects, and the words associated with them, in mental pictures, and the storage of those pictures in the brain to be retrieved in future. Essentially, memory is a space in the brain where knowledge and experience of something are kept. The two are absorbed into space and stored for the length of time dependent on the importance of products to the consumer, and retrieved when the consumer needs to make decisions on product choice. Memory, thus, has a major role in consumer behaviour and choice.
The consumer retains knowledge and experience over different lengths of time. Information stored in consumers’ memory may include the quantity of products in the market, availability substitute/alternative products, recognised brands, shopping experience and consumption experience. Consumers’ creation and use of memory involve three main stages: encoding, storage and retrieval. This entails the consumers allocating space for the storage of information, retaining that information for as long as it will be useful, and retrieving it when necessary. The storage and retrieval of consumer knowledge and experience go through three memory stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.
A sensory memory lasts the shortest of the three. In fact, it can last for a few seconds, or for as short as a split a second. This type of memory is categorised into echoic memory and iconic memory. Echoic memory involves the memory of what the consumer has heard about a product or service of interest, while iconic memory relates to the memory of a product a consumer has seen. Both types of sensory memory occur in the process of a consumer looking for information regarding a particular brand or product. In the active process, consumers’ motivation and attention levels are very low, making the memory fade fast, as they are exposed to only tiny pieces of stimuli from which their activeness diverts attention.
Apple frequently places products like Apple Macs and iPhones on many TV series and movies. The length of time of exposure is usually so short as to create a sensory memory. Viewers only realise of their exposure to Apple products shortly after its occurrence. The Apple products they stimulate their minds and may be one of the things the viewers think of at the end of the movie. If any of them was in need of a phone or laptop, they would consider the brand they watched. They might even go as far as searching for information in other about the product. In this case, information transfers to short-term memory.
Short term memory happens during the process of encoding, where a brief storage of information occurs. At this stage, the brain tries to understand the information it is accepting. Short-term memory lasts from eighteen to thirty second. Other than the length of time, unlike sensory memory, selectiveness characterises short-term memory. Short-term memory is dependent on the ability of a particular consumer to be motivated to find information about a product of interest, as well as his or her ability to process the information. As a result, the knowledge of a brand and familiarity with it will depend on every consumer.
For the products of Apple to be part of the short-term memory of consumers, there is a need for the company to gain consumer attention, desire and interest. The Apple brand, which features a bitten apple, serves well to attract consumer attention. The white colour of the Apple, which is not the fruit’s natural colour, is associated with sophistication and purity. This adds to the nutritional characteristics of an apple, which amplifying its effects. The Apple logo features on both Apple products and the packaging of the product. The logo not only catches the attention of consumers but implants into the memory of consumers the product on which they saw it.
Other than the logo, advertisements featuring Apple products contain various brightness and types of colours of suitability to the audience. For example, commercials about iTunes and iPods involve an illusion of music albums popping out of them. The intention of the illustration is to indicate the quantity of storage memory of the device. However, the illustration also helps consumers remember the product. The illustrations also inform consumer expectations of the product, thus increasing the likelihood of a consumer to make a purchase. The more creative and differentiated a visual illustration, the more likely consumers are likely to remember the product, the stronger the brand becomes.
Such advertisements, however, need to be characterised by clarity, consistency, and lack of overload. This is because the role of advertisement is to create product awareness, provide information regarding the product, raise sales, and retain customer loyalty. It is therefore important that the quantity of information provided is that which customers can absorb fully, retain for longer without being confused, and be able to retrieve easily. The short-term memory can, at any one time, only process a maximum of five pieces of information. It is thus necessary that the quantity of information about a product be limited to only its essential attributes. This would help prevent information from dissolving or decaying. If consumers are not too overloaded with information, they are likely to appreciate the product more than otherwise.
Rehearsal, circulation, and elaboration are necessary for the transfer of information to long-term memory. One elaboration example is the 2007 iPod print and billboard advertisement in the US. The cool and colourful advertisements featured a silhouette of a people plugged into their devices gesturing in various ways. The adverts conveyed the idea of escaping the realities of the problems and challenges of life and being overcome with dancing and relaxation. The concept of relief and happiness, which is a common subject of human pursuit, is an elaboration of what Apple believes the consumers of his products would get if they use its products. It is also powerful enough to be installable into the long-term memory of consumers via the brain’s encoding process.
Information stored in the long-term memory lasts for a significantly long period of time, or even close to permanently. It is in the long-term memory of consumers that Apple needs to place its products and services. In the long term memory, consumers retain knowledge of Apple’s products, and their familiarity with them, which reflects the loyalty to and trust of the Apple brand. The loyalty and trust is a competitive advantage over rival companies. Because of the two, consumers would opt for the Apple’s products, even in cases where rival brands offer a product of similar or higher quality at the same for cheaper prices.
There are two main categories of long-term memory. They comprise the autobiographical memory and semantic memory. Autobiographical memories entail peoples’ personal memories of themselves and their pasts. Vivid imageries typify these memories and involve the senses of smell, hearing, taste, touch, and sight. The idea of nostalgia can be exploited for product promotion, and, hence, improve consumer loyalty. In fact, it is what underpins the concept of a brand. It is never entirely about a particular brand, but rather the memory the brand brings to the consumer as well. The product do not necessarily have to have a given sound, smell, touch and visual quality; rather, the mentioned can ‘surround’ its promotion and serve a marketing purpose.
Apple has successfully exploited the concept of nostalgia as a marketing vehicle. The earliest example involved the use of nostalgia is the 1984 Apple Macintosh launch. The launch was a commercial in the US National Foot League Super Bowl, which had millions of viewers at the time. Many years after the launch, a Futurama episode reenacted the same advert. The memory of the Super Bowl and the Futurama series does not leave out the memory of the adverts. Even though the products are improved today, the adverts keep the brand in the long-term memory of the consumers of Apple’s products. This is achieved through the association of the brand with happiness and pleasure of the NFL super bowl times. Nostalgia thus boosts the market image of products.
Unlike autobiographic memory, which is associated with particular experiences, semantic memory is associated with general knowledge. In the context of consumer knowledge, customers know that a particular product exists, but do not necessarily know of the existence of all the various brands that produce that particular product. In such cases, consumers do not make a decision to buy a product on the basis brand. A brand that wants to capture a wider market, or rather to outdo its competitors, need to take measures that make it stand out in such a manner as to implant itself in the memory of consumers semantically. Associative networks facilitate the long-term semantic storage of information in such a way that words are linked to brands. Consumers retrieve information by associating words with particular brands. Marketers not only need to be cognitive of these links but also choose memorable words that favourably describe their products.
Apple facilitates the implantation of the semantic memory of its products in the minds of consumers of technology products mainly through differentiation. The company maintains a unique logo, a unique design, and unique packaging. The uniqueness makes it stand out from its competitors like Dell, Microsoft, and Samsung. It has done so in spite of the fact that products of other brands perform exactly the same function as those of Apple from the perspective of the average consumer. In fact, Apple has been so successful in the differentiation respect that some Chinese producers have copied its products. To overcome such problems and other challenges, Apple has invested in comparative advertising, which involves using words to compare its products against other companies’, for example, the Mac against other PCs. The colourful verbal presentation of its computer’s distinctive features and attributes creates an appeal that makes consumers remember the product for long, and, hence, include their likelihood of buying them.
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It suffices to deduce that the case of Apple clearly demonstrates the importance of memory to marketing. This is evident from the examples of Apple’s strategies for product promotion. The paper identified three types of memories: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. All these memories are important, and their application depends on whether the company wants to promote a new product, maintain consumer loyalty to its brand, or something in between. However, the ultimate goal of a company is to implant its brand in the long-term memory of its consumers. If a company invests in the study and application of the concept of consumer memory, they will be able to win consumer loyalty, which will guarantee it a significant market share for a long time. It will stand out among its competitors, even in cases where consumers would get the same satisfaction from other brands’ products. The result would be large market share and high sales.
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- Hoyer, Wayne D., Deborah J. MacInnis, and Rik Pieters. “Consumer Behaviour, 2001.” South-Western College Pub 5.
- Hunter Jr, Richard J., and Lindsey Puliti. “Counterfeit Products within China-A New Twist to an Old Problem:: Imitation Apple Retailers.” International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences 2, no. 9 (2012): 400 – 410.
- Kumar, Minu, and Charles H. Noble. “The Process of Creating Value and Communicating It To The Consumer: A Product Design Perspective.” In Proceedings of the 2007 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference, pp. 305-305. Springer, Cham, 2015.
- Moutinho, Luiz. The Routledge companion to the future of marketing. Routledge, 2014.
- Pedersen, Isabel. ““No Apple iPhone? You Must Be Canadian”: Mobile Technologies, Participatory Culture, and Rhetorical Transformation.” Canadian Journal of Communication 33, no. 3 (2008).
- Stern, Barbara, George M. Zinkhan, and Anupam Jaju. “Marketing images: Construct definition, measurement issues, and theory development.” Marketing Theory 1, no. 2 (2001): 201-224.
- Szmigin, Isabelle, and Maria Piacentini. Consumer behaviour. Oxford University Press, USA, 2014.