Do you use iPhone? Do you have an iPod or an iPad? Have you ever heard that every time when there is a new Apple product coming out, a lot of people complain about its unsuccessful design or some features but few of them actually refuse to buy it? Apple is one of the most successful brands all over the world.
Take the third quarter of 2015 as an example, the revenue of this quarter was 49.6 billions dollars, which increased 33% compared with the corresponding period of 2014. Notably in China, the revenue of third quarter of 2015 was 13.2 billions dollars, which increased 112% compared with the same period of 2014. Why is Apple so popular? There is no doubt that the characters of sleek design, user friendly system, fast browsing speeds, simple but elegant appearance can explain the popularity of Apple devices. However, besides those characters, the effective Public Relations strategies Apple applied can also account for its incredible sales.
One of the successful Public Relations tactics Apple adopted is its distinctive advertisements. As Dan Moren (2011) stated that Apple’s ads let products speak for themselves (Macworld). There are a lot of brands that are willing to spend a big sum of money inviting a celebrity to endorse their products. What these brands want is using the influence of the celebrities to attract customers and improve the sales. On the other hand, however, in Apple’s ads, it is hard to find celebrities. Products themselves are the leading roles of the ads. What the company wants to emphasize is the functions of the products. Through the ads, customers can conclude themselves that iPhone can truly make the life easier. The commercials ensure that when customers eventually do pick up an iPhone, they already know how to use it (Moren, 2011).
Second, Apple’s ads, although with no celebrities, are always filled with common people and impressive stories. In the ad named New Beginnings (2016), several people from different fields talked about their experiences of creating an app with Apple products. In the commercial, a teenager coded and created an app which could be downloaded on Apple Store and she received a letter from Barack Obama. A Beirut youngster created Beirut Electricity, an app that could provide the electricity cut off time every day in Beirut. Beirut is in Lebanon and every day the city cut off the electricity. A volunteer doctor in Africa created Safe Delivery app which could teach millions of women the knowledge of safe birth through small videos. Everyone in the commercial did something good for the society using Apple products. Their tears after the success are touchable and it conveys that use Apple and you can do something to change the world like them.
Another commercial called The Old Record (2015), which is special for Chinese sale territory, also tells a warm story. A girl found an old record in grandma’s house. She listened to the music and re-composed it with guitar and Macbook secretly. After grandma listened to the “new” song, grandma teared and recalled her young age. Tens of thousands of people were touched by this warm story in that cold winter. They remembered their own grandmothers and realized that they should do something special to express their love to their families. Customers would like to choose Apple because it carries those impressive stories and what customers pay for, in this sense, is not the products but the empathy.
Imagine that one day you could be a starring role in a
commercial on the TV. Is that cool and excited? Than imagine that the
commercial is for a beauty brand. Traditionally, the figures in a beauty brand
ad should be slim, rosy cheek, charming eyes, bright skin…
Do you believe that
your dark skin, your fat waist, your strong arms could be showed on TV? Sounds
ridiculous! But, more and more girls are willing to post such videos on social
media platform in which they remove their makeup and show their real face.
People begin to discuss what the real beauty should be. Hourglass
figure is charming but very few women could be like that. Bright and silk skin
is perfect but mostly because of Photoshop. Commercials make a lot of effort to
praise the “perfect and extreme” beauty for a very long time. Girls, because of
the effect of those commercials, are less and less confident about their face
and figure. A lot of girls have plastic surgeries to pursue, what commercials
called, “beauty”.
Nevertheless, Dove did something unusual. In order to revive
the brand that was overshadowed by other competitors and boost its sales in the
early 2000s, the PR agency, Edelman, conducted a survey. More than 3000 women
in 10 countries were in involved in that study (Kiley Skene, 2014). When it
reported that only 2 percent of the respondents considered themselves
beautiful, the company saw a great opportunity (Nina Bahadur, 2014). They
considered to start a conversation about beauty—— later the conversation became
the Campaign for Real Beauty.
They firstly set up a lot of “Tick Box”
billboards in Canada, then in the US and the UK. The billboards featured
pictures of women along with two boxes such as “withered or wonderful?” in
order to let the passersby vote. “The campaign led 1.5 million visitors to the
Campaign for Real Beauty website, alerting Dove that it was on the right track
—— this was a topic women wanted to talk about” (Nina Bahadur, 2014).
After
that, the company launched a lot of other campaigns, such as billboards that
posted groups of common, diverse women in their underwear. These women were not
idols or celebrities. They were just common people like you and me and they
were not as beautiful as the ladies posted on ads—— slim, pretty, sexy.
Like we imagined at the beginning, Dove also invited common
females to engage in their ads. The short movie Evolution was the first double Grand Prix
winner in the history of the International Advertising Festival in 2007(Kiley
Skene, 2014). This video documented the editing process of the model’s ad on a
billboard. An average-looking girl became a model after dressing up with pretty
makeup and fashionable hairstyle and photo-shopping.
Real Beauty Sketches
is a viral video in which a police sketch artist portrayed a few women two
pictures for each. The first portrait described what the women looked at
themselves and the second portrait, also the prettier one, showed the versions
in others’ eyes. The video managed to convey the idea that you are more
beautiful than you think.
Dove embraced groundswell. They cared about customers’
thoughts and they tried to praise customers’ standards of beauty. Dove used all
things, like billboards and videos to convey that every customer was beautiful.
These ideas flattered customers. So was the campaign influential? Yes. Thanks
to social media, those several widespread videos were posted on the YouTube at
first and then became popular. The video Evolution is watched 18,719,318 times
and is liked by 36,430 users on YouTube now. There are 158,000 followers on
Dove’s Instagram page and the tag “RealBeauty” is used in 123,991 posts even
after ten years from the beginning “Tick Box” billboards. A post on Dove
Facebook page using the tag of BeautyStory is liked by 145,000 people. With
efforts of the entire company, Dove harvested a big success. In 2014, ten years
after the first steps in the Campaign for Real Beauty, the sales had increased
to $4 billion from $2.5 billion in its opening campaign year.
Have you ever booked and lived in an Airbnb house? If yes,
have you enjoyed your stay there? Is the owner friendly and hospitable? I spent
a real happy time in the Airbnb house when we were in Florida. It is white
wooden house surrounded by some trees and bushes. Every morning the birds and
the sunshine pouring through the windows woke us up. Everything in the house
was clean and neat, from every single cup to every piece of carpet. Although we
didn’t meet the owner, we could feel her warm welcome from all parts of the
house. During our stay there, the owner didn’t show up. I was surprised at her
trust in us because all the communication between us was through the Internet.
We were probably cheaters (although actually we are not hhhh). However, because
of her trust, we enjoyed our days there and we protected and cherished her
house like ours! As a result of the cheeriness I have through Airbnb, I put my
eyes on Airbnb’s Super Bowl Ad this year. (Although our landlord is very nice,
I still want to say Airbnb’s CS team is so poor…)
This year, Airbnb’s ad names We Accept. They conveyed the
messages of acceptance, love and multiculturalism by putting different people’s
half faces together as different whole faces. These people were from different
countries, races with different colors and genders. Like Expedia and Coco-Cola,
Airbnb this year didn’t promote their brand with the exception of their tiny
logo which appeared at the end of the ad. The ad began with a pupil and then
zoom out to people’s faces. The pupil implies our eyes and how we see the world.
Different faces flashed through the screen with appearance of some white words:
We believe no matter who you are, where you’re from, who you love or who you
worship, we all belong. The world is more beautiful the more you accept.
#weaccept. Theses simply words emphasized the idea of “acceptance”. We should
accept difference, we should be more tolerant to others, we should respect
diverse cultures. And also, Airbnb as a brand of hospitality, they emphasized “home”,
“united” in the ad as well by using the sentence “we all belong”. Here, it may
imply that Airbnb could provide homes and shelters to people in need, which
matched their idea and slogan “book unique homes”.
Besides the humanistic care Airbnb delivered, the ad was
also on the list of politically charged commercials this Super Bowl season. To
some extent, the racism has raised after the election. There are always news
stories all over the nation that immigrants are attacked by extreme racists.
Due to some claims stated by President Trump (these claims might be overemphasized
by media), racists (maybe wrongly?) believed that the United States was trying
to drive away immigrants. People now, especially 61 million immigrants are in a
picnic. They are not sure whether they still belong to the US or where they
should belong to. Airbnb expressed their care and support to all human without
consideration of races, countries, colors, or genders. They posted the ad on
their website along with a letter #weaccept. In the letter, Airbnb noted the
reasons they made such an ad and what they have done. They’ve provided housing
for evacuees of disasters. They started to provide free housing to refugees and
those barred from entering the US.
Nevertheless, compared with the optimistic idea Airbnb tried
to convey, the comments on YouTube under the ad were not optimistic. There are
4 million views of the ad on YouTube since Feb 5, 2017. 1,736 comments are made
by netizens. People on YouTube don’t buy the ad. The reasons of thumb-down are
different. Some of them think it hypocritical because of some behaviors Airbnb
acted. Some of them object because the different political viewpoints. The big
amount of negative comments makes me think how difficult it is for companies to
find the balance point between groundswell and politics.
Do you use iPhone? Do you have an iPod or an iPad? Have you ever heard that every time when there is a new Apple product coming out, a lot of people complain about its unsuccessful design or some features but few of them actually refuse to buy it? Apple is one of the most successful brands all over the world.
Take the third quarter of 2015 as an example, the revenue of this quarter was 49.6 billions dollars, which increased 33% compared with the corresponding period of 2014. Notably in China, the revenue of third quarter of 2015 was 13.2 billions dollars, which increased 112% compared with the same period of 2014. Why is Apple so popular? There is no doubt that the characters of sleek design, user friendly system, fast browsing speeds, simple but elegant appearance can explain the popularity of Apple devices. However, besides those characters, the effective Public Relations strategies Apple applied can also account for its incredible sales. 
One of the successful Public Relations tactics Apple adopted is its distinctive advertisements. As Dan Moren (2011) stated that Apple’s ads let products speak for themselves (Macworld). There are a lot of brands that are willing to spend a big sum of money inviting a celebrity to endorse their products. What these brands want is using the influence of the celebrities to attract customers and improve the sales. On the other hand, however, in Apple’s ads, it is hard to find celebrities. Products themselves are the leading roles of the ads. What the company wants to emphasize is the functions of the products. Through the ads, customers can conclude themselves that iPhone can truly make the life easier. The commercials ensure that when customers eventually do pick up an iPhone, they already know how to use it (Moren, 2011). 
Second, Apple’s ads, although with no celebrities, are always filled with common people and impressive stories. In the ad named New Beginnings (2016), several people from different fields talked about their experiences of creating an app with Apple products. In the commercial, a teenager coded and created an app which could be downloaded on Apple Store and she received a letter from Barack Obama. A Beirut youngster created Beirut Electricity, an app that could provide the electricity cut off time every day in Beirut. Beirut is in Lebanon and every day the city cut off the electricity. A volunteer doctor in Africa created Safe Delivery app which could teach millions of women the knowledge of safe birth through small videos. Everyone in the commercial did something good for the society using Apple products. Their tears after the success are touchable and it conveys that use Apple and you can do something to change the world like them. 
Another commercial called The Old Record (2015), which is special for Chinese sale territory, also tells a warm story. A girl found an old record in grandma’s house. She listened to the music and re-composed it with guitar and Macbook secretly. After grandma listened to the “new” song, grandma teared and recalled her young age. Tens of thousands of people were touched by this warm story in that cold winter. They remembered their own grandmothers and realized that they should do something special to express their love to their families. Customers would like to choose Apple because it carries those impressive stories and what customers pay for, in this sense, is not the products but the empathy. 
