While a storm has raged around Apple’s inability to release a working MobileMe product and other issues, Apple has been quietly going about the business of increasing its market share. After years of building on “lifestyle marketing” that target the family, the student, the hipster crowd and now enterprise, Apple is taking the concept one step further and going after a whole new lifestyle - the luxury market.

We should have seen this coming with the release of the MacBook Air. This product is strictly designed with the luxury traveler or business executive in mind and is priced accordingly. Not a tool for the heavy computer user, it is based around the concept of personal cloud computing and is designed to get the user from point A to point B in style.

Apple Enterprise Sales Group has been spending the last few months getting Apple’s in luxury hotels and cruise ships around the globe. The idea is to hook the customer while they travel, adding to the travel experience, then strike a sale once they fall in love with using a Mac.

Fontainebleau Resorts in Miami is one of the early adopters, with a roll out of 24″ iMacs in every hotel room planned for the near future. That’s 1400 iMacs in use by a rotating set of customers every year - heck, every day in some cases. That is priceless amounts of advertising for Apple and well worth striking a deal over.

Imagine the impact this kind of real world use by happy travelers will have on the Apple bottom line and over all market share. I’m guessing the Enterprise Sales group is singing all the way to the bank after this particular brain storm.

Royal Caribbean has been ahead of the curve. Macs have been in its floating hotel cruise line for the last three years with great success. They are now upgrading to ad Apple’s IT infrastructure to their other lines. According to one source that means over 16,150 ethernet drops per ship. That’s a lot of cable, but also a lot of priceless exposure for Apple, especially if they prove that they work flawlessly for the customers of the hotels and ships.

By bridging the gap between “hearing about” the ease of Apple and actual hands on use, Apple is touching on a whole new market. Even better, hotels and cruise ships are clamoring for more: their customers want easy to use music, movie, IT and computing solutions available to them, and Apple is the perfect fit. This is a marketing strategy destines for success.

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 10:37 am under Apple, Mac, imac.  Print This Post

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