7 Key Strategies That You Must Learn From Apple’s Marketing Rethink the Need for Advertising

2. Avoid Price Wars by Emphasizing Your Unique Value Proposition

Many entrepreneurs believe – falsely – that they have to compete on price. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, competing on price can actually hurt your business.
Apple knows this and has never wavered on its pricing strategy.
Dropping prices and competing on price leads to a “race to the bottom.” If you’ve ever looked at job boards for freelancers, you might see some strange things. For some sites, the going rate for a blog post is $10, or even less!
This might sound like a great idea, but it’s really short-sighted when developing market share. “You get what you pay for” has never been more true than when businesses and freelancers try to underbid each other. Content marketing requires quality and it will be hard to get that for dirt cheap rates.
Your $10 post is almost certainly going to be poorly written, with no exclusive research or data to back up opinions. And, that post could simply be regurgitated from someone else’s site – or even outright copied, word for word.
Even Copyscape can’t protect you from junk content. The foundation of content marketing is quality content as the cornerstone of a marketing mix.
That’s because no freelancer could survive on $10 per piece, unless they can create each piece in bulk. But your marketing strategy won’t survive if you don’t work on smart quality.
Instead, do what Apple does.
Apple focuses on their UVP (unique value proposition), which is beautiful design that works right out of the box with ever-smaller packaging. It’s a marketing strategy that gets juice throughout social media and is very much a competitive advantage for Apple and its market share.
What about cost? Well, let’s just say Apple is absolutely not competing on price! In fact, you’ll almost certainly pay more – sometimes a lot more – for an Apple product than you would for a competitor’s version of the same product.
Take some computers, for example – let’s say, two similar laptops, like the Microsoft Surface Pro, which costs about $900. Apple’s MacBook Pro, on the other hand, costs over $1,200.
How can Apple keep its fans with a pricing strategy so much higher than the competition?
It’s because Apple doesn’t view PCs as competition. Where others focus on a single killer feature through a variety of content marketing, Apple focuses on the entire product, and it shows.
In fact, Apple routinely earns its higher prices with top-of-the-line features and specifications.
You can implement this same strategy, no matter what niche or industry you’re in and regardless what your business model may be.
Whether you’re selling products or services, the key to making this strategy work for you is to make sure that you justify that higher price to capture your market share.
For SaaS companies, that could mean creating a higher degree of personal service or a full money-back guarantee.
For coaches or consultants, the competitive advantage could mean beautifully branded deliverables, in addition to work sessions or Skype calls.
You can also follow Apple’s example by offering a variety of options for your products and services at different price points. For instance, Apple’s MacBook laptop line offers larger screens and other enhanced features, for a higher price.
Yes, Apple is like the Rolls Royce of technology products with a retail store design that look more like a show room. Their customers are more than happy to pay that premium, because they know they’ll get their money’s worth.