If you know me, you are probably itching to know why on earth I would write an article with such a title. I am the iPhone guy. I am heavily involved in an upcoming book about apps. My future is altogether wrapped up in the app business. I admit, the title is a bit hyperbolic so please read to the end—this article is really about determining the best possible mobile strategy for your brand. It could save you a lot of pain.

Read the rest on Skookum.com.

I’ll be posting more iPhone related articles on Skookum (stuff I would usually post on Tapity) so I would suggest you subscribe.

Here at Tapity, Jeremy builds Grades and I attempt to market it. And my main marketing strategy right now is what I call “marketing by providing a service.” The idea is that instead of getting into the consumer’s face and informing them that they should buy my product I simply provide a service targeted for my market, college students. While they are enjoying the service they will spontaneously be exposed to my product.

What a concept.

Traditional marketing (i.e. billboards, radio ads, magazine spreads, newpaper ads, banner ads, and television ads) uglify our highways, annoy us, distract us, confuse us, and interrupt us. So instead of uglifying America or annoying, distracting, confusing, and interrupting consumers, we decided to start a blog as a service to college students. The blog’s purpose is to give students tips on how to get the grades they want with less stress and more joy.

Geico practices this. They create commercials that provide a service for consumers, namely, to amuse them. I once heard a Geico radio commercial that ran as follows:

Announcer: And now we bring you reading through literary classics with Geico. Today’s reading: A Tale of Two Cities.

Character 1: Ah! It was the best of times, it was the worst of times!

Character 2: Come on, man! Which was it?

Character 1: The best of times.

Character 2: Why?

Character 1: Because I saved 15% on car insurance with Geico.

Announcer: This has been reading through the classics with Geico.

It amused me. And it was highly effective because the delight it gave me prompted me to talk about it to many people.

Apple practices this also. I knew a person who had a small white spec on the screen of his iPhone. He couldn’t get it off, so he took it to the genius bar at the iStore. The genius told him that it was a spec of dust that had gotten in between the screen and the glass during the manufacturing process; the genius then asked for the phone. He took it into the back of the store, gave it a new screen, and handed it back to my friend at no charge. This is providing a service to the consumer; and it causes consumers to talk about Apple’s brand.

37signals practices “marketing by teaching.” This also is a kind of service. They use their blog as a forum for teaching others what they learn. This is what sparked Jeremy to start this Tapity blog and it has worked well for us.

Marketing by providing a service is effective because it causes consumers first to be delighted and then to talk about your brand. In Seth Godin’s terminology, it makes them “sneeze” your “ideavirus.” Marketing by providing services increases consumer “sneezing.”

In addition, it’s simply more noble than getting into the public’s face and telling them that they want your stuff.

In this post I’ll wrap up my blog posts on lessons from Apple with three more general lessons and the final, fundamental lesson.

#11    Get a vision of the future. Because iSteve and Apple are intensely focused on user needs, they are able to discern current technologies’ failings and weaknesses in meeting those needs. Thus they can see how technology needs to change in order for users’ needs to be better met. By having a laser-beam focus on user goals, they gain a vision of the future. That’s why they’re never caught by surprise; instead of being the victims of “unpredictable” history, they make and shape the history of technology.

#12    Define the rules of the game; lead, don’t follow. Once you have a vision of the future, you can make it happen. Today, Apple is defining and moulding the shape of the computer industry. It’s calling the shots. It has gained control of the direction, which it can turn in whichever direction it pleases. Everyone else is just reacting. And as all the iPod killers have shown, reacting to a leading company that has a vision is a very unenviable position.

#13    Drive your niche/industry in to higher dimensions where your consumers’ goals are increasingly well-met. If you do this, people will take notice. You will be a big deal. And people will keep buying your products. And you will always be ahead. Your forward progress should not be more features, cooler graphics, or faster processors merely; instead, your progress forward should consist of your consumers meeting their goals better, faster, more easily, and with greater delight, satisfaction, and happiness.

#14    But the most fundamental lesson of Apple is: focus intensely on creating the best, most artistic, and delightful product to help consumers meet their goals. Don’t focus primarily on advertising or money. Those shouldn’t be your passion. Steve Jobs doesn’t live in a sprawling mansion with a gate around it. He lives in a neighborhood with no gate and has a nice but not sprawling house, living relatively modestly. This is because he doesn’t care so much about money as simply creating great products for human beings. Although Apple’s near demise in the ’80s at the hands of Microsoft seemed to indicate the triumph of Machiavellian business sense over creativity, today the pendulum has swung. The chess board has flipped around. The shoe’s on the other foot. So focus first on satisfying customers and second on the business side of things. Steve Ballmer says “developers, developers, developers.” Google says “users, users, users.” But you should say “goals, goals, goals.” Just to focus on the “user” is too general, vague, nebulous. Focus instead on the user’s goals.

— Josh

In this post I’ll list five more lessons from Apple. In these points the emphasis is on marketing and making digital products successful after launch.

#6    Be a purple cow; be remarkable. This flows naturally from the lessons on product design. You have to create a product that is remarkable, which Seth Godin calls a “purple cow,” something that stands out from the crowd. Your being a purple cow is your marketing. This is precisely what Steve Jobs did after his second advent: he said “by-by” to beige and created the bondi blue iMac. People took notice. And Apple began to slowly recover. Uniqueness, “purple-cow-ness” was one of Apple’s main tools for getting attention and sales. Ever since Apple has created remarkable products which stand out from the competition. This is the best marketing strategy.

#7    Be cool. Now, this matters less if you make utilitarian products like virus protection software. It matters little if you’re selling tractors. But if you sell consumer products, and especially if you have significant competition, you can get the edge by out-cooling your rivals. Apple did this in many ways: artzy iPod ads featuring sillouettes dancing to popular tunes and Apple stores in malls with sleek, minimalistic decor are examples of Apple’s mastery of the cult of cool. You can also become cool by convincing the public that your competition is uncool. This is the see-saw effect. Herein lies the genius of the Mac vs. PC ads. In those ads Apple tricked the viewer, who expected a debate over whether Macs or PCs are better; the viewer is surprised to see that Mac is a really nice guy and the two never debate. Viewers then let their guard down, allowing Apple’s real message to get to them: PCs are geeky and are only good for doing geeky things. If you have a remarkable product it won’t be hard to gain a “cool” image and to paint your competition as “uncool.”

#8    Become a big deal. Apple gets plenty of press coverage, inverviews, and attention because they’re a big deal. Now, most of us can never hope to become a big deal in the same way that Apple is. But we can find ways to become a big deal in our market or niche. Become somebody. Matter. Then people will pay attention to you and you will get lots of free advertising.

#9    Find creative ways of dealing with the competition. Apple finds real creative ways of dealing with its competitors. During the early 2000s Apple made mainly operating systems and computers and was competing with Microsoft, which had almost all of the market share. Instead of raging against Microsoft and going down in a Thermopolae-esque blaze of futile glory, Apple created a Trojan horse—three of them actually: the iPod, iPhone, and iPad (go here for a break-down of how this tactic is working). Millions of PC users who would never have contemplated buying a Mac bought these devices; and many began to be pleased by the artistry and craftsmanship of Apple’s product. A steady, increasing trickle began making the switch. In addition, Apple has taken hold of the direction of the computer industry, turning it in the direction of mobile devices in which it is king (if you can’t beat ‘em, pull the rug out from under them). Thus large market-share in the PC realm may become increasingly irrelevant.

Consider Google. The kingdom of Mountainview decided to take over the world by moving everything “to the cloud,” the place where they are king. To this end, they created free programs such as gmail, google maps, and began developing Chrome. This threatened Apple. So Apple hit Google’s homebase—search and targeted advertising. By introducing a world of specialized apps Apple has begun elimininating the need for many kinds of search (check out this article about how “Apple killed the future of search”). Also, Apple introduced iAds, making the app system a serious alternative to a Google-centric system.

#10    Pay attention to the market and overall consumer satisfaction rather than individual users, cranks, geeks, and critics. Many times, Apple’s non-inclusion of a certain feature causes many users, cranks, critics, and geeks to throw tantrums. Such cranks, critics, and geeks present themselves to Apple as a fountain of conventional wisdom. But if sales are up, consumers are generally satisfied, and there is no market pressure, why bother taking the time or using the energy to include that extra feature? This is especially true if the demanded features hinder many users from meeting their goals and will weigh down the product.

—Josh

This could be really, really, really big. The Wall Street Journal has sources that claim that Apple is charging a premium for iAds where premium means charging one cent per impression and $2 per tap (for us developers that means .6 cents per impression and $1.20 per tap). On one hand, this kinda stinks for marketers who can’t pay (and will mean it will mostly be the big brands at the beginning) but on the other, this could be a boon for developers trying to make a consistent income from their iPhone and iPad apps.

I am really sorry I haven’t posted about Grades for a while—detailed launch analysis is coming, I promise. Over the summer I will be coming up with strategies to monetize Grades now that the initial launch spike has passed. iAds could play a huge role in this.

One interesting statistic is that Grades currently does about 2000 sessions per day (it’s opened 2000 times per day). That means a good percentage of the people who purchased the app are using it frequently. It also means that if I could find a way to triple or quadruple my user base, I could easily do 10k impressions per day. I could probably pull this off by doing a free+ version of the app.

With iAds, 10k impressions = $60 sure cash. Then, assuming there is a 1% tap-through rate (which I think is extremely conservative), that’s 100 users tapping the ad, that’s $120. So that’s $180/ day total. Okay, so thats not going to make me a millionaire but I think these are pretty conservative estimates and that is a good $64k a year. Not bad for a relatively passive income (and many times better than what I’m making now at $1 a pop). I also think that tap-through rates could be much, much higher than 1%. For one, these ads are displayed right inside your app so users won’t worry about losing their context; for two, I think people will actually want to check out these ads since they will be interactive, high quality, and downright fun! So assuming the tap-through rates were more like 5%, 10k sessions = over $600. That’s $216k a year.

To summarize, I think iAd is a win-win for users and developers. Users will be able to try out high quality apps for free and check out really cool ads. If they don’t want ads, they could opt out by paying a buck or two. For developers, we now have an amazing way to make consistent long term revenue without the need to be in the top 100.

Would love to hear your thoughts.