iLounge

By Charles Starrett

Senior Editor, iLounge
Published: Monday, November 26, 2007
News Category: Apple

In a recent interview with Fortune, Apple’s vice president of Hardware Product Marketing Greg Joswiak spoke about the current state of the iPod, how the marketing of the devce has changed over the years, the iPod touch and iPhone SDK, the potential for growth in some international markets, and more. Responding to a question on how to handle an open iPod and iPhone, Joswiak said, “One of the things Steve talked about in his open letter is something Nokia’s doing, which is requiring a digital signature. That way if there’s something wrong with an application, you have a way to track it back to where it came from. So one of the things we want to do, again, is create a development environment that is going to maintain the security and reliability of the iPhone yet at the same time offer developers some really cool things that we can do.”

Speaking about the changes in iPod marketing that have been made over the years, Joswiak said, “I think what has changed over time is certainly early on, people had to understand what an iPod was about. You had to understand the whole message of a thousand songs in your pocket. So some of the early advertisements had to set up some of that foundation. In a market like the U.S., where we have 77 percent market share, that’s really not required. People understand what the iPod is – it’s become a cultural phenomenon here. So we can change the way that it’s marketed.”

He continued, “But when we went into Europe a couple of years ago with advertisements, when France was in single-digit market share and Germany was in single-digit market share, we again had to establish the ‘thousand songs in your pocket.’ We ran advertisements that were more foundational than the silhouette ads that we’ve done. And we saw market share rise pretty significantly — again, our latest French and German market share is about 28 percent each. That’s a pretty significant rise over a two-year period.” Joswiak went on to say that he sees a “significant opportunity” in international markets where the iPod’s market share is below 30 percent, due to the lack of a major name-brand competitor.

Finally, in discussing how Apple plans for future models, Joswiak explained, “We try to understand as we develop our product road map, what’s going to be exciting in the future. And that’s one of the advantages we have over our competitors. Our competitors tend to put the cross hairs on where we are now, and by the time they come up with a product that tries to match where we are now, we’re beyond them. We’re one or two generations beyond, moving faster than they are.”