The New Apple Vision Pro: Breaking Down Apple’s Marketing Tactics
From the perspective of an outside observer
Apple got faced with 3 major marketing challenges with the Vision Pro:
- Making it seem cooler than what is already on the market (such as the Meta Quest)
- Making the price tag worth it
- Driving hype that makes people buy
These three things may look simple and trivial, but when you are a 2.9 trillion dollar company, you don’t want to mess it up.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has said that the company is not obsessed with being the first, instead, they want to be the best. And hence, they don’t mind being second or even third.
The Apple Vision Pro is now selling at around $5,000 on the resale (secondary) market (mostly overseas). This is a big bump over the $3,500 retail price set by Apple. Without a doubt, the Vision Pro marketing was a huge success, despite a lot of people (including myself) having doubts they could pull it off smoothly.
This is a deep dive into everything Apple did right in the marketing of the Vision Pro.
The Launch — Making It Cool
This was certainly not a new product on the market. A number of Virtual Reality (VR) headsets have already been launched by several companies. The most notable was Meta (formerly Facebook) launching the Meta Quest.
And if we (the consumers) have learned anything in the flood of the new VR hardware, it is that the vast majority of us are not ready for it. Or even that we don’t need it (yet).
This reminds me of an old interview with Bill Gates in 1995 (watch from 3:12–5:22) trying to convince a Talk Show host that the internet was the future. Everything Bill Gates raised as a point, there was already something that served that purpose.
At that time, it doesn’t seem like the internet brings much to the table. Except for one thing — it presents a new way to do the things we already do. But over time, this broadened out and the impact of the internet became much more profound.
This is not to compare the VR headsets with the internet. But we might just be underestimating how profoundly VR changes the way we live, work, and play. We don’t know what the best VR use case will be today, and that makes it harder to market it to people. So, what did Apple do?
The Vision Pro has 3 distinct qualities:
- The transparent effect — the screen that shows you the eyes of the person wearing it
- The hand-click gesture
- The eye tracking
I have not tested the device myself. But Marques Brownlee’s review is pretty concise. These three features make the Apple VR headset unique. So, Apple focused on just one of those three.
The one they focused on is the most noticeable. They don’t have to tell you — they just show you. And it stands proud on the Apple website for the Vision Pro:
This singular feature they showed easily drew interest and curiosity. When it was first announced in June 2023, there were all kinds of theories about how this feature was possible. But now we know it is a kind of screen.
The point here is that this feature does not add any value to the person using the VR headset. Instead, it is a feature for the person looking at the user.
This is baked into Apple’s main brand selling point as a status symbol. The core diehard fans of Apple care more about how people perceive them. And this feature is such a winner.
Apple designed an experience for someone who would be an observer of their user. In the luxury (and the affordable luxury) industry, it doesn’t get much better than that.
The Pricing — Making it Worth It
From the onset, the pricing was sketchy. This was the main point that brought Apple criticism on the product. Even fans of Apple think the price tag of $3,499 was too expensive.
For comparison, Meta Quest has a range of prices starting from $399 to $1,000. Apple going for more than double what Meta’s high-end, was a bit far.
I certainly believed Apple had taken it too far and very few will pay that much. But Apple always has an answer. And their answer is scarcity.
The initial shipment was about 60,000 to 80,000, and the preorders sold out in 18 minutes. And it is said that they have already sold over 200,000 units of the Vision Pro.
Now, that is not the interesting part. The really interesting part is that the demand has gone crazy now such that resale is now selling for $5,000. This reminds me of luxury watches and sneaker drops.
This is the second weapon in Apple's tactical marketing genius — scarcity
Of course, there is the store exuberance and excitement for the first set of buyers. And then, there is the social media strategy of people just wearing the Vision Pro. That of course is met with mixed reactions.
There are those fascinated and there are those bewildered by the kind of dystopian future this is creating. There was a video of a woman in a Tesla Cybertruck using the Vision Pro while driving (with no one else in the car). It might just be a publicity stunt, but it is actually a very dangerous idea.
The thing is that Apple doesn’t even need to do these things anymore themselves. Thousands of people all over the world are willing to advertise for Apple on their social media platforms.
And this leads to the third and most important point.
The Hype — Market Segmentation
The market in every industry is divided into 3 broad groups — the early adopters (those are the crazy weird ones), the mainstream adopters (which is about 80% of everybody), and the laggards (who won’t change until they can’t find the old stuff anymore).
Most businesses make the mistake of trying to chase mainstream adoption from the onset. This is why I like that Seth Godin phrase that says, “People like us do things like this”.
Apple didn’t try to chase mainstream adoption. There was already the cheap and affordable VR headset from Meta. So, instead of chasing the mainstream 80%, they focused on the early adopters 10%.
In the coming years, as there are more improvements on the Vision Pro, Apple will likely release an affordable version. But the company has done well in this first release to focus on the “crazy ones”.
The Apple Vision Pro is not for everybody. Apple knows that more than anybody else. So, they market it to the people it is for. They market it to the crazy ones, using pricing power and scarcity as handy tools.
It is not Apple’s job to market the VR headset to the rest of us. It is the job of the crazy weird ones to convince the rest of us that they are not as crazy as we thought. And Apple will sit down and patiently wait for that.
I have not seen the Apple Vision Pro ad anywhere online. (I am certainly not a tech early adopter). But I have seen tons of videos of people using it. That is the power of a brand.
Would I consider buying it because of that? No, I’ll wait till it becomes functionally useful for someone like me. But the mainstream 80% is starting to find it interesting.
Would it be a blockbuster product like the iPhone? Right now, I don’t think so. But as spatial computing becomes more mainstream, it might become the new standard over the coming decades.
Spatial computing might just be right now in the same place the internet was in 1995.
Conclusion
Apple’s Vision Pro was a marketing success because of three things:
- The distinctive feature of the product (that’s not even to the user, but to the observer)
- The scarcity, which made the pricing seem less
- The focus on the early adopters
I hope you found something worth learning from the trillion-dollar brand.
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