4Ps OF MARKETING

Vision Statement

“An Apple computer on every desk” - Steve Jobs

Mission Statement

“Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary IPhone and App Store and is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices with iPad” (Apple.com).

Company Background

Apple's high-profile co-founder and former CEO Steve Jobs died on October 5, 2011. Tim Cook, who handled the company's day-to-day operations as COO during Jobs' leave prior to his death, was named CEO. Jobs left Apple with a stable of innovative products and a revolutionary distribution system for applications that continue to stimulate demand for those products. Apple was downgraded to concentrate on small niche status in a market which is mostly dominated by Personal computers based on Microsoft Windows. However, Apple is leading the market with its innovation strategy reflected through its unique products. These products are attractive enough to be sold in the market with the user friendly design. The company had largely maintained their large loyal customer bases which are ready to pay the premium prices for the Apple's products. The only reason for the behavior of the customers is the quality in the products and features that clearly distinguish the Macs.

Company History

In 1977, Apple was incorporated. Steve Jobs along with Steven Wozniak co-founded the company. Company introduced for the first time Apple I computer in the year 1976 (Hormby, n.d). Though was not successful, but the second launch of Apple II in 1980 was successful. The initial public offerings (IPO) of Apple offered in 1980 in the stock market(Apple). Critical management changes took place in the early 1980, due to the internal difficulties and competition from the PC market.

Later in 1983, IBM entered into the market and gave a tough time to Apple, resulting in failure of Apple III version. Macintosh; the first mouse driven pc by Apple was introduced in the year 1984. PC market in 90s was fed with cheap PC clones, also windows 3 were launched by Microsoft (Press, 1991). Apple launched PowerPC chip in order to compete with Intel's high speed PC processors. Later on the introduction of Windows 95 compounded many other problems. Keeping in view the problem, Apple acquired NeXT this (Rhapsody) became the next generation operating system of Apple. Steve Jobs returned as interim Chief Executive of the company in 1997 after the company lost millions of dollars.

Under the leadership of Mr. Jobs, company divested from the unsuccessful businesses as spin-offs, including its personal digital assistant product line and the Newton. Company made a deal with Microsoft for the appearance of MS office on Mac personal computers. Apple pursued a number of acquisitions during 2002. In the following year, Apple, Ericsson and Sun Microsystems formed an alliance to create a standard format for delivering multimedia content to wireless devices, such as Smartphone and ...