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Gateway is not
exactly a PC company that anyone envies. Right off the bat, the
company seemed to have a really unusual (to put it gently) way of
selling computers. After all, how many retail outlets would let you
try something on - and then make you wait while it came in the
mail?
And this is the company telling potential customers to "Think
Smarter"?
The irony is not subtle here. Gateway, once reasonably respectable
in the consumer market, has fallen far in the last two years. Hit
hard by the slowdown in computer purchases, Gateway has had to revamp
its image and system of selling computers quickly or Dell would have
rolled it over and picked its pockets. That could still happen.
On the other side of the coin, Apple has had something of a
renaissance over the same period. Earnings have remained on the plus
side (except for one niggling quarterly loss) in the last few years.
Apple's marketing has been extremely successful. New products have
been rolling off the line pretty consistently. And the Apple stores
appear to be doing well.
It's pretty clear that Apple is continuing to build a strong
company while Gateway is floundering about trying to get out of the
red. So who's smarter?
Ironic as well that Gateway exhorts the consumer to "Think
Smarter" while showing very little creative ability. Surely thinking
smarter would mean coming up with your own, unique ads rather than
parroting the competition?
Building a bit of marketing muscle without riding the competitions
coattails through mimicry might also be a "smarter" approach.
The Profile 4 is a nice enough machine on the outside, I suppose.
The problem is that it's pretty mundane - not mundane according to
PC standards, mind you, just mundane my Apple standards.
Isn't this something like the 20th
Anniversary Mac? And isn't the "upright design with everything
crammed behind the
monitor" the same design rejected by Jonathan Ive when he created the
new iMac design? On the design front, there's not much new and
exciting.
Everything else in the campaign has a certain amount of spin about
it as well. Simplistic tests, misleading comparisons, and skewed
pricing information all point to the fact that, quite simply, pound
for pound, the iMac is a better deal.
I suspect that Gateway is banking on that great marketing wisdom
that works so well in North America: "Consumers don't read past the
headline."
That fact is really the only thing that Apple should be worrying
about when it comes to Gateway.
"Think Smarter" indeed.
Further Reading
Today, Accelerate Your
Mac! has a reader reporting that "(eTestingLabs) ran Quake III
on the Mac in Classic, that's why they got the low scores. Talk
about cheating...."
Gateway:
Think Smarter, Not Different, Paul Thurrott, WinInfo, 08.26.
"With a projected loss of $200 million to $250 million this year
on revenues of $5 billion, the company needs a bit of a sales
spark to turn things around."
Stephen Van
Esch is the founder and president of
the
E-learning Foundry, an online training
resource for Mac users. Steve loves the Mac and is doubly bilingual,
since he's also fluent in Windows and French.
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competition?
Building a bit of marketing muscle without riding the competitions
coattails through mimicry might also be a "smarter" approach.
the
monitor" the same design rejected by Jonathan Ive when he created the
new iMac design? On the design front, there's not much new and
exciting.
