The reign of Apple’s iPod, most familiar and popular portable digital music player, is now facing some threats from other competitor of the market and most important from the non-market competitors too. In this competitive market of the world, it has been needed for Apple to change their marketing plan and strategies as a part of their market development for their own survival in the existing market.
First let me come to the competitors from the outside of iPod’s market and that is mobile phone. It has been broadly reported that different mobile phone companies intend to market mobile phone with an extensive opportunity of storing and playing music as iPod does. Some of the mobile phone companies have already introduced such mobile sets which are in some cases giving more facilities to their users than that of an iPod. I got amazing news in a news base website that these days about eighty percent of the leading mobile phone companies give music option to their customers. I am quoting some lines from that website:
“Eihgt out of the world’s Top Ten best-selling mobile phones in September featured music-playing technology, according to a survey of sales on six continents and over 50 countries carried out for Krusell.
Furthermore,the latest figures from IMS Research show that mobile phone sales will top 960 million units in 2006 and over 1 billion in 2007. The net result is that mobile phones are definitely eating into the market share of dedicated music players such as the eponymous iPOD from Apple.”
Nokia’s new model N91 is getting popularity which gives a lucrative offer to its customer. In this set 3000 songs can be stored in a row. Nokia expects to market their new model with the opportunity of storing 6000 songs. Mobile phone companies are also offering the option of downloading music form the companies’ store which is very much similar to the iTunes of Apple. Verizon sets are providing this service. Moreover, there are some other companies like Vcast through which can download a song without going through the computer.
In addition to Mobile phone, other iPod like digital music players are being introduced these days. For instance, Microsoft is going to market a product named “Zune” which you can find similarity to the Apple’s iPod. Moreover, to create a competitor of iTunes of Apple, Zune will introduce Zune Marketplace where its users will be able to buy music with minimal cost and in this product two users can share music through their devices. They do not need to go to computer. To give a short idea of the advantages of this new product, I am quoting some lines from a website:
“The player's strong point lies in what Microsoft describes as "the Zune experience." Wireless player-to-player sharing lets owners spontaneously share full-length tracks of songs, play lists or pictures. This feature allows them to listen to the full track of any song received up to three times over a period of three days.
If people like the one or more of the songs they hear, they can flag it on their player and easily buy it from the Zune Marketplace, Microsoft's version of the iTunes store, either from their PC or directly from the player. This feature allows a person to become exposed to a wide array of music that they may not have heard or discovered otherwise.
The Zune Marketplace allows a person to buy individual songs, much the way iTunes does, but the consumer has the option of buying a "Zune pass," which gives them access to unlimited downloads for a flat monthly fee.”
Here, it is seen that the competition is not only from Apples own marketplace rather from other business. It was not expected that iPod will have to compete with mobile phone as both the products are different. So, for technological development Apple is now thinking to introduce a Mobile Phone for their survival. This business change is known as Marketing Myopia from the marketing perspective. It is also possible for Apple to give some extra facilities in terms of price, facilities and other promotional activities to make iPod alive for a longer time.
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