"If You Don't Have an iPhone...."

Topic #1-Advertising: iPhone 4 Commercial

I found this commercial on YouTube for the iPhone 4, originally uploaded in March. I had seen it on TV many times and like some other apple commercials, it stuck in my head. There are no characters in this ad, only a hand holding the iPhone and showing all of the amazing things it can do. The music is a nondescript background song. The ad focuses on the huge app store available to iPhone users. It shows that with an iPhone you can store a mobile boarding pass or Starbucks card (which can be conveniently scanned right from the phone.) Apple tells us what awesome features an iPhone has by telling us that without an iPhone, you cannot do these things.

Apple is definitely employing the band-wagon approach to advertising in this ad. Their message in this commercial is that "if you don't have an iPhone, well, you don't have an iPhone." This leads people to believe that without an iPhone they may be left out of the growing circle of people that do have an iPhone. If they don't have an iPhone, they won't have access to all of the apps that their friends have (1 billion apps and growing have been downloaded) and thus they'll be excluded from a special community. I myself thought this ad was a little silly and did not make me want to buy an iPhone, but I still thought it was creative and made good use of demonstrating the technology that the iPhone 4 has. 

My interpretation of this ad is that people always want to feel included, and the band-wagon approach in this commercial speaks to that. While the message of "keeping up with the Jones'" is nothing new, I think that Apple is the best marketer of that idea. This ad does use the association principle because it connects having an iPhone to having an image of being cool, modern, and technologically savvy. As a brand, Apple has always marketed the idea that if you use Apple products you are in some way "cooler" than people who don't. I think many consumers of Apple products are proud of this image and see themselves as having superior tastes to non-apple users. I feel that this ad targets college students, young adults and professionals. According to Alwaysonmessage.com 52% of people ages 18-29  and 45% of people ages 30-49 own an iPhone. I don't think this ad includes stereotypes necessarily, it just tries to convince the viewer that people who don't have an iPhone are less "with it" than people who do have one.

This ad is definitely memorable. Apple has three commercials in total sporting the "if you don't have an iPhone" tagline. The campaign sticks in my mind because I think many of the features detailed in the ads are available on other phones and the tagline seems a little ridiculous to me. I don't have an iPhone and these ads didn't make me want to run out and buy one because i feel left out or envious of iPhone users. I have looked at iPhones and think they are really cool, but simply cannot afford a phone like that. I don't feel bad about not having an iPhone though. With regards to the target audience, I think the ad did a good job because it speaks to the fact that people want to feel included and keep up with the latest technological gadgets. The ad succeeded in making me want to check out the iPhone and other apple products further. Bottom line for me personally is that the iPhone is just too expensive.

From doing this assignment I learned how to analyze an ad and look deeper into its message. I might just be doing this with every commercial I see! My conclusion is that Apple uses a lot of band-wagon marketing for its products. This iPhone 4 commercial is a good example of that. It encourages people to at least check out what the iPhone has to offer and hopes that maybe they will decide that it's better than other smartphones.