Crafting and Executing Strategy Apple Inc. in 2008 - Case Study Example

Crafting and Executing Strategy Apple Inc. in 2008 Introduction Apple is arguably the world’s leading handheld device manufacturer. The company accesses the global market and its products put up a fair competition against some other major international names such as Acer, Blackberry and the Hewlett Packard among many others. In the year 2008, the company introduced into the market a number of some innovative devices and recorded historic sales figures within days. The expansive sales records and the great success story of the year resulted from a number of sales and management strategies key among which was and still is innovation.

The company believes in creating better and more innovative devices in every subsequent product they launch. This has this far worked to their advantage revamping their sales year after year.After releasing the first version of iPhone in mid-2007, the company under the watch of its chief executes Steve Jobs watched as the product struggled to keep pace with the other leading mobile devices in the market. The product eventually sold a million copies in close to three months. Being the preliminary product, the first iPhone served its purpose effectively by pointing out the specific features about the smart phone market that the company might not have considered before unveiling the product.

It is therefore from this that the company learnt to revamp innovation in their subsequent product. Innovation refers to the process of altering a product in order to create a newer product possibly from an existing one. The iPhone 3G succeeded the first iPhone and level of innovation in the new product became evident even in the name of the device. This product promised faster performance with download speed unique to the smart telephony market. Besides the faster processor, the phone had new better performing application intentionally added into the product to win new markets within the previously existing market (Thompson, 2011).

It was therefore not surprising that within three days the phone had outsold the figures it took its predecessor three months. The innovative brand-positioning tool worked effectively for the company with the new applications increasing the sales despite the obvious performance flaws.Innovation is a marketing strategy that if used effectively alongside other marketing techniques yields results as was the case with the Apple Inc. in 2008. It is important for business organizations to carry out expansive market research in order to determine the new features.

It is more prudent for the new features to have an inclination towards the market otherwise, the company may not even know what new to include on an existing product. The Apple Inc. sacrificed an entire generation of their first iPhone simply to learn the market. The management attests to the difficulty of marketing the first phone owing to the stiff competition from other companies such as Blackberry, which had some of the features the first generation iPhone lacked. In retrospect, besides the company’s open association with innovation as a marketing strategy, it is also evident that the company devised other marketing techniques which resulted in the record breaking success of the iPhone 3G key among these was the effective market research which thereafter informed the innovation of the new product.

Additionally, the company improved the visibility of their product preparing the market for its introduction even before the product arrived. This created an opportunity for their previous clients to improve their gadgets while attracting new buyers for the obviously reputable product.ReferenceThompson, A. A. (2011). Crafting and executing strategy: The quest for competitive advantage : concepts and cases. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education.