I thought I wait a few days to see what the fall out to the latest Microsoft commercials would be.
Guess what, the obvious happened.
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes posted on March 31st, 2009
Two mistakes Microsoft made in its “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person” ad I the ZDnet Blogs.
What seems to be missed is the fact that Microsoft does NOT make PCs, it made the OS that runs on any PC you want to build. (Lets not get silly and point out you cannot run XP on a built with parts from 1995)
Apple on the other hand DOES make PCs, (yes folks ALL Macs are PCs because they are personal computers. PC does not equate to Microsoft. Why? Because Linux also runs on PCs which are…wait for it…Personal Computers!) Apple also makes the OS that runs on the PCs they build.
So what is my point? There no mistake has been made.
According to Adrian
Mistake #1 – Setting the price point at $1,000
A $1,000 is a lot of dough to people in the current climate, and the ad hits us with this upper limit price 7 seconds in. I’m guessing that a lot of people switched off by that point before getting to the meat of the ad. On top of that, the $1,000 upper limit was also a bad idea given that the final system cost under $700 (I’d have set the limit at $750 given that outcome) and that it allowed Apple to sneak in a system priced at that upper limit (thus telling people that Apple have a notebook for $1,000).
Can you really buy a brand new Mac laptop for a $1,000 or less? But you can get a laptop running Microsoft Windows. So why a $1,000 price point? Simple, in this current climate you really have to be flush with cash to spend more. Thus anything less that can get you what “Lauren” wanted is a deal. The $750 final price just proved the point.
Please note, you can get even cheaper and more powerful systems if she wanted a desktop! But Lauren wanted a laptop.
Mistake #2 – Not hammering home the cost of a comparable Apple system
I think that the ad stumbles big style when it comes to handling the price difference between a 17-inch Mac system and the system that the red-headed Lauren ultimately buys from Best Buy.
In the ad Lauren says that in order to buy a Mac she’d have to double her budget of $1,000 if she was to be “cool enough to be a Mac person”. In reality a 17-inch MacBook Pro costs $2,799, so she’d need to triple her budget. Out it another way, she could have bought four of the notebooks she picked for that price. Most people would consider $2,800 to be a lot of cash and the contrast between the HP system and the MacBook Pro system.
Hammering home the cost? Why bother. The fact is, the price was set at a $1,000.
Anything more would seem like they were trying too hard to convince the wrong target audience.
Funny thing thought in an earlier post Adrian has the right idea in a way. It is what you can get for the price you want. What you can do with the OS you get.
“I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person”
This is just the minor poke at the Apple Ads. Yes it is minor, because it is not the main thrust of the commercial.
Let me say for the record, the commercial did what it was supposed to do. Is it a success? Is it a failure? That my friends is up to you, and what you decide to buy. Me? I’ll buy a Mac when I find that the Mac can do something I need that my “PC” cannot do.
