苹果竞争优势案例研究 Apple Competitive Advantage Case Study

“竞争优势超过竞争对手的优势，通过向消费者提供更大的价值，无论是通过降价的手段或通过提供更高的收益和服务证明更高的价格”。

在这种情况下，苹果公司的净优势超过其竞争对手如黑莓、谷歌Android，Palm Pre和HTC。他们的成功在于其竞争优势包括公司成本结构、产品和客户服务。此外，苹果能够与竞争对手区别开来，并能够以同样的价格收取成功的价格，从而获得客户的满意。但是，利用其竞争优势并不意味着公司应该忽视其他竞争者，仅仅因为技术的趋势不断地随着新产品和创新不断发展。

"A competitive advantage is an advantage over competitors gained by offering consumers greater value, either by means of lower prices or by providing greater benefits and service that justifies higher prices"(Porter 1980:26 ). In this case, Apple Inc has a net advantage over its competitors such as Blackberry, Google Android, Palm pre and HTC.Their success lies in its competitive advantages including the firm's cost structure, product offerings and customer service. Furthermore, Apple are able to differentiate themselves from its competitors and have been able to gain successful customer satisfaction, in the same way they can charged a premium price. But using its competitive advantage does not mean that the company should ignore other competitors, simply because the trend of technology continuously keeps progressing with new products and innovations. Product differentiation
Apple products are significantly costly, they targeted a certain segment of the market by producing high quality products which are potentially durable and unique for example the iPhone range and newly launched iPad in 2010. Businessweek investigated that apple are planning to cut the price of their computers considerably low and far more affordable to all individuals, the iMac and MacBook laptops were designed for the purpose of multimedia, most media companies uses the apple products to run their businesses as apple provide loads of incentives from its software Mac OSX. Aggressive competitions from Microsoft with windows 7 multi-media may have lead Apple to reduce their prices to gain market-share. (Businessweek.com, 2010)

Core Competencies and Growth Strategy

Apple`s customer orientation is to introduce the iPhone series and recently the iPad. Both devices are made at high specifications, enabling users and businesses to access their data easily and efficiently. It was reported that these high tech devices were faster than any others products in the market. The products are unique at this stage as Apple are reputably known as 'innovators' (Macworld.com, 2010). Following this trend, Apple company structure has always been an example. They are often known as re-designing or re-structuring their organisation for instance hiring new employees of high competencies such 'Mark Papermaster' from the IBM Company who joined Apple in 2009 (Networkworld.com, 2010). Apple value chain has also been analyzed as effective, Crompton (2010) retrieved that Apple has reworked their value chain to create manufacturing, which improved the quality of its product in the end of the 1990`s. Their production plants are outsourced from china in which they have exclusive relationship with suppliers and chip-set manufacturing companies such as Foxconn Limited from China (Businessweek.com, 2010). Apple marketing strategy is planned on a geographical segmentation; in the UK for example they have subsequently sub-contracted their products to network providers such as O2, Vodaphone, Orange and Three networks. These telecommunication mobile providers offer amazing discounts on pay as you go and sometimes delivering free iPhones to customers with a contract on a pay monthly basis. Secondly Apple has a massive advertising campaign on private TV Cable and Newspapers (The Guardian UK, 2010). On the other hand, Apple`s activity and main core competencies comes with its R&D. According to Datamonitor (2010) the company believed an investment in R&D (Research and Development) should keep them at competitive advantage within the industry (Datamonitor, 2010). In brief, in order to maintain and acquire its position in the market, the Apple Company has developed its online support in delivering updates in its software applications also known as (Appstore) acce