Apple

Lost Opportunity: How Apple got its strategy wrong

It wasn’t just the pricing that did iPhone in. Apple got everything--starting with marketing communication to the sales and distribution model--wrong

IPhone’s launch in India has been dubbed the biggest failure of a top-notch brand from a well regarded company in recent times. Two months after the dust over the launch and the subsequent wave of disappointment has settled, it’s time to take an objective look at what actually went wrong with iPhone in India, given that it has been a runaway success in most other markets it was launched in.

Unlike the initial argument that it was the steep price tag that queered the pitch for iPhone in India,there is more to the debacle than just the pricing.Besides a very high price tag, one main reason behind iPhone’s failure in India is that there was a very weak link as far as consumer confidence was concerned.

Apple’s rivals in India, industry observers and analysts say that a flawed sales and distribution model and communication failure were the biggest reasons behind iPhone’s debacle.The company failed to strike a connect with Indian consumers.

India not a priority market?

Selling huge numbers in India was not even Apple’s game plan, it seems. Around the time of its launch, the company had said it hoped to sell 10 million units

Not good enough:

While Airtel ran commercials outsourced from Apple for four weeks on a few TV channels,Vodafone used the envelopes of the mobile phone bills sent to its customers to apprise them of iPhone’s launch in India.Globally by December, whereas in India, it would ship 100,000 phones by December 2009. Clearly, Apple wasn’t expecting big sales from the market.

Yet, what is surprising is that the company didn’t even manage to achieve this target. Apple had imported around 50,000 phones at the time of the launch but had only managed to sell around 11,000 units so far.

Analysts argue that by downplaying India, the world’s...