14 DAY TRIAL // According to Harvard's Business School professor David Yoffie "no other company has ever received that kind of attention for a product launch. It's unprecedented". The attention Apple got from all the televisions, newspapers, websites and every other type of publicity source you may think of saved them a gross 400 million $ in free publicity.
If you think about the figures, this is indeed a fact we never heard about in our entire life but this is not only due to the uniqueness of the product Apple launched in January 2007 during the MacWorld fair taking place in San Francisco. This is a direct cause of the huge media coverage available for all the companies out there and the complete secrecy that preceded the iPhone launch.
If you remember, and I'm sure you do, until Steve Jobs raised it's hand holding the iPhone and the conference screen displayed the handset nobody had the slightest idea of what the device will look like. That increased the eagerness of the press and of all the people that started making guesses on how the iPhone will look a few months in advance.
If one thinks about why a newspaper would publish a picture that is as big as the whole front page, the conclusion pops right ahead. Because the thing was as good looking as everyone expected it to be and had sufficient innovations, compared to the other cellphones available on the mobile market to date, to be considered an innovative device.
If you doubt that, just think about the handsets that came up on the market right before it was launched and the way everyone compared every single handset unveiled by any random mobile phone manufacturer to Apple's phone (and if I'm not mistaking, they are still doing it despite already having a number of alternatives launched by LG or Samsung).
Leaving behind us the causes of all this free publicity Apple has been getting in the past few months, have you ever thought what will the results be? According to the same man that did the calculations and ended holding in its hand a piece of paper (or in front of its computer) with the 400 million figure, all this attention iPhone got from all the people will "drive people into the stores to test the products. It will help sell a lot more iPods and iPhones. Think of all that publicity as a substitute for marketing costs and an opportunity for Apple to dramatically increase its market share."
So you shouldn't only expect the iPhone to sell very well but also the image of Apple as a company to grow in everyone's eyes and, therefore, we should expect Apple to take over more and more on every market it is involved right now.