Marketing Plan at Apple Inc

As Apple Inc. has become the number one since the return of Steve Jobs in 1996 with successive launch of blockbuster products such as Mac book Air, I-Pod and I-Phone, which have not only redefined the product category but challenged the recession making Apple, become the second most valued company on the planet. This has made Steve Jobs the darling of the customers and investors and his health concerns have put question mark on succession of leadership. But since the medical leave of Steve Jobs the company, Tim Cook has become an acting CEO and that showcases that there is a plan for sustainable leadership at Apple Inc. But there are other potential candidates, who also have proved their mettle as part of success matrix at Apple Inc. and these include:

1.      Craig Federighi, senior vice president, software engineering responsible for Operating system development for all Apple products (Mangalindan,P,J 2011)

2.      Ron Johnson, senior vice president, retail responsible of developing and launching the Apple 300 retail across the globe (Mangalindan,P,J 2011)

3.      Bob Mansfield, senior vice president, Mac Hardware Engineering responsible for developing MacBook Air and iMac and now incharge of iPod and iPhone (Mangalindan,P,J 2011)

4.      Scott Forstall,senior vice president,in charge of iOS software and according to Cleve Nettles"Forstall is the man if SJ(Steve Jobs) gets to pick (his successor)" (Mangalindan,P,J 2011)

5.      Peter Oppenheimer, senior vice president, Chief Financial Officer responsible for treasury, corporate development, human resources and reporting the latest financials to analysts and media, weighing in on company performance and offering guidance on where revenues and profits (Mangalindan,P,J 2011).

6.      Bruce Sewell, senior vice president, general counsel to defend the company and preserving its intellectual property, whether it's a lost iPhone prototype or a patent lawsuit (Mangalindan,P,J 2011).

7.      Jeff Williams, senior vice president, operations ,who reports to COO Tim Cook and is largely responsible for managing the product parts supply chain and making sure all products, from that new MacBook Air to the iPad 2, pass the company's strict quality control standards(Mangalindan,P,J 2011).

8.      Eddy Cue, vice president, internet services manages iTunes and the App Store, two of the company's most important properties, along with iBooks, Apple's e-books foray. It's a far cry from his start with Apple in 1989, working as a junior desktop support staffer (Mangalindan,P,J 2011).

9.      Katie Cotton ,vice president, worldwide corporate communications ,who is a  gatekeeper to Steve Jobs and manages, the media for anything Jobs-related -- interviews, questions about his health -- and it's Cotton again who contributes to product launches and reportedly, the upkeep of Apple and its CEO's appealing, yet enigmatic image, making her one of the most powerful women in Silicon Valley(Mangalindan,P,J 2011).

10.  Dr. Guy (Bud) Tribble, vice president, software Tech, a veteran who led the development of the operating system for the first Macintosh in the early 1980s and currently defining the software engineering group's technical direction, but insiders also single him out as the company's unofficial CTO(Mangalindan,P,J 2011).

11.  Greg Joswiak, vice president, marketing manages promotion of the iPhone and iPod, but he also plays an active role in their development, working with the company's engineering teams to design the next wave of devices, down to features and price (Mangalindan,P,J 2011).

Apple’s challenge might be also to find a leader from outside, who would be charismatic and visionary like Steve Jobs or from the current management pool.

Social Media Tools: Percolate

Social media tool is an online utility delivering social media functionality. It provides you a shared open loop platform where every individual has an access to manufacture, market, advertise, sell any type or kind of product to the world through the networking of internet and using social media tools.

There are wide range of social media tools which can be used to get more interactive communication or exchanging of information with the customers. Today brands has acquired audience at an unexpected scale and all the credit goes to social platform like Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler etc. The challenges today's businesses are facing is how to figure out best way and effective way to social media.

Percolate solves this with its intelligent content platform by helping and assisting both scale of the brands and sustaining their digital content strategies. Percolate works in 5 step process they are as follows;

Calibration: The first step is where the brands interest and goals against a subset of the five million sources of Percolates are calibrated, by answering a series of questions a brand strategy is created that will power your brands Percolator.

Filter: Percolate uses its algorithms effectively by calibrating all the stories from the sources and bubble up only the most relevant and interesting content for the customers.

Curate: One of the major advantage of using Percolate is that there is nothing a brand will be able to present to consumers without first being touched by a bran representative of Percolate.

Publish: Once the brand editor has stamped, the curated story is ready to be pushed to social platform like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. Every channel has been examined so that the customer has been satisfied.

Social Media Policy

Social media policy has become a standard to explore new ways of communication between a company profile and its customers and colleagues. Social media is transforming the way companies interact with customer to build much stronger and more reliable business relationship.  A social media policy outlines for employees the corporate guidelines or principles of communicating in the online world.

A major reason of social media policy is a companies first line of defense to mitigate risk for both employer and employee. An employees honesty, dishonesty, transparency, truthfulness, can quickly be noticed in the social media environment.

The major purpose of the social media policy is to use these communication channels responsibly by supporting the companies mission, goals and sanctioned efforts. They also have to follow and make sure that social media transparency doesn't violate company's confidentially or legal guidelines in commercial speech. Perception is reality and drawing boundaries between public and private, personal and professional becomes most important in social media policy.

THE SOCIAL CUSTOMER: SOCIAL CRM FOR BUSINESS

Social CRM is strategy to make conversation with customers who bring you money and make your customer happy. Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy supported by a technology platform, business rules and social characteristics which are designed to engage the customer.

            Social CRM bring together two terms social networking and customer relationship management that represent a current and an old time conflict. The need for an individual employee to first and above all have his own personal and professional contacts and relationship managed in personal environment.

            Tools such as LinkedIn, Plaxo and Outlook take tiny steps forward but still leave most of the employee’s contacts out of the job equation. Social CRM is the first strategy that is often supported by various tools and technologies. The strategy is based around customer engagement and interactions with transactions being a byproduct. CRM is comprised of sales, marketing and service/support based function whose purpose was to move the customer through a pipeline with the goal of keeping the customer coming back to buy more and more stuff.

            In social CRM the customer is actually the focus point of how an organization operates. Instead of marketing or pushing messages to customers, brands now talk to and collaborate with customer to solve business problem. Traditional CRM was very based around data and information that brands could collect on their customers, all of which would go into a CRM system that then allowed the company to better target various customers. Social CRM and the computing initiates without clearly defined benefits for the company and the customers will be the biggest cause of failure.

MARKETING STRATEGY

Marketing strategy is to create innovative ways which is beyond its traditional method. Strategy majorly consists of capturing a customer and satisfying their needs and also creating a customer and satisfies their needs. With marketing comes competition to capture potential customer. There can be various ways to deal with this question and it can be varied. Marketing creates and also satisfies needs of customers. It is essential to understand through customer’s point of view and following its strength, weakness, opportunities and threats.

In today's growing and innovative fields of marketing strategy and e-business, better research for use of information and creation of knowledge using actual and new decision tools are essential.