Apple Company: History, Products, Stakeholders, Marketing & Success Metrics

Apple Company History and Founders

         The apple company is one of the most elite and crème del crème gadgets and fashion manufacturers and sellers. It's well known for its top-notch electronics such as smartphones, computers, accessories, and the kind of services it provides to its esteemed customers (Feeley, 2021). The most popular products produced by this company are the I-phone, I-pads, and Macs, just to mention a few. Its birth began in 1968 when it was established by a group of individuals who were pioneers in semi-conductor processors (Avila, 2019).

         The company's originality is in California, USA, while the company's founders are well-renowned businessmen (Steve Jobs, Steve Woznick, and Ronald Wayne).

The company has about 500 operational retail stores around the globe with about 120,000 employees. It’s driven by a vision of providing its customers with a user-friendly and well-conceptualized technology at a pocket-friendly price.

          The company is governed by a mission of ensuring that people from all walks of life are considered by coming up with a technology that allows them to experience a unique computing approach without considering whether they are skilled or unskilled.

Moreover, apple company is governed by five key values: discipline, risk-taking, quality, and customer and result orientation.

1. Problems the Apple company faces-Those problems may include lawsuits, under-representation by various ethnical groups, stiff competition from the competitors, market uncertainty, marketing of the investors, and a decline in the smartphone market (Tilak Naik & Vaikunth Pai, 2018).
2. Statistics of the Apple company:Based on various financial years, the following statistics indicate how the company performed in the market. During the year 2021, the apple company was able to generate a revenue of 365 billion U.S. Dollars, whereby 52% of that revenue came from the I-phone sales. The apple service generated a revenue of 18%. In 2020, the sales units were 230 million on I-phones, 71 million on i-pads, and 2o million on Mac and Mac-Books. The fashion division grew by 25% in the year 2021, while the subscriptions on its services by the customers on apple music and apple T.V.s were 70million and 40 million, respectively.
3. A problem to focus on:there are several challenges the apple company faces in its day-to-day operations; however, in this case, one of the problems to be discussed is the decline in the market smartphone market. Smartphones are seen to be the epitome of our current lifestyles and day to day activities; however, this may seize to be the case since most of the customers that are using the smartphones seem to be deviating from their use to the usage of devices that are connected with the internet such as Amazon's without the influence of the smartphone (Gao, 2021). Smartphones are becoming less dependable. Also, the smartphones associated with the Apple company are known not to be to-date, which plays a key role in weakening their smartphone sales market. This problem can be solved by ensuring most of the smartphones produced by the company are modern and be a product that most of its customers can depend on most of the activities, ought to install to-date software on the smartphones.

The company has several stakeholders who have different attributes and responsibilities towards the apple company. They are all ranked based on their order of importance to the company. Based on the company on the analysis of the company, the stakeholders are categorized as follows;

1. Ultimate stakeholder; involves the kind of stakeholders that ought to be addressed first; under this category, several stakeholders fit in this branch, including employees, stockholders, customers, and the government of the United States of America.
2. Supreme stakeholders; involve stakeholders that are allowed to work overseas on the contract, the other stakeholders in this category are the suppliers.
3. Flexible stakeholder; this involves the competitors and the government of the people of China.
4. Quiet stakeholders; include stakeholders from various monitoring groups.
5. Non-stakeholders; involve the USA-based workers who can benefit from the company if the job opportunities land within the U.S. 

     The current company's 4P is used primarily to enhance the company's marketing strategy. The frameworks within the marketing strategy mainly focus on the prices, products, places, and promotions (Kurita, Sugishita, Sugawara & Ohkusa, 2021). These strategies play a core role in the brand success and implementation of the marketing plan. These 4p frameworks include;

1. Product strategy focuses on the company's innovativeness in terms of coming up with a new product that will be sensational in the market and attract more customers.
2. Price strategy; Apple products are premium products that only target specific individuals in society. The company focuses on the premium pricing strategy while targeting its premium customers.
3. Place strategy; the company has established more penetrative means of reaching its customers. This strategy is well executed by the presence of Apple retail stores across the globe. Also, its partnership with other distributors will boost its area of distribution.
4. Promotion strategy; the company has an aggressive way of advertising its products as it targets its customers; this may involve using suitable, reliable, and effective channels such as televisions, online advertisements, and billboards (Lu & Business, 2018).

        The Apple company ought to develop a better pricing strategy that covers the pockets of the individuals interested in any of the company's products. The market of its products only targets the wealthy in the society but also should target the middle-class income earners. The company should produce products that a wide range of the market can be enjoyed but of better quality.

     The company's reasonable and decisive implementations are derived through coordination and an organizational model which focuses on innovation and customer-based interests (Tilak Naik & Vaikunth Pai, 2018). Through this model, the goals and objectives of the company are met.

          The shareholders of the Apple company are the individuals at the senior management levels who own more than 10% of the company's stock. It is broken down into;

1. Individual shareholder; involves three individuals within the company that owns various shares. Arthur Levinson, who is the chair of the board of Apple, owns 4,592,140 shares, Tim Cook, former CEO, owns 0.02% of the remaining shares, and Jeff Williams, who is the operating officer at apple, owns 489,260 shares.
2. Institutional shareholders; Vanguard Group Inc owns 7.83% of the outstanding shares. Blank Rock Inc owns 6.60% of the outstanding shares, and Berkshire Hathaway Inc owns 5.96% of the outstanding shares.

The new 4P framework may resonate with the following marketing strategies.

1. Product placement- This strategy indicates that the Apple company doesn't have to rely on online adverts; in this strategy, products can be advertised by celebrities, popular shows, or Buzz.
2. Price-In the case of Apple Inc., there is the need for the organization to moderate the prices of its products and services that will further accommodate a large group of customer segments within the market platform.
3. Place-This involves storytelling and video marketing; it conveys its marketing message through some of the recorded inspirational stories and videos which might resonate with the targeted customers.
4. Promotion- This will entail adverting the products through different media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Television, and many more. This will further enhance how the organization reaches its target audience. 

         The implemented marketing strategies by the company have proved to be expensive since a lot of the cash spent in this kind of framework is evaluated to be millions of U.S. dollars. The new 4P framework cost seems to be inexpensive and effective since most of the implemented strategies work and improve the market products and services provided by Apple company. On the other hand, the new framework will cost around $5000, a value that the organization can easily implement to enhance overall levels of effective operation within the business environment.

The metrics are that success plays a key role in evaluating a number of factors that make an organization or company a success, also known as the key performance indicators. Some of the metrics of success in the company may come from the new 4Ps adopted by the company. They are;

1. Increased number of customers through the product placement approach, the customers, ought to increase automatically since it targets customers online or through televised content.
2. An elevated level of income, as the number of customers increases, the income generated is high.
3. Market extension, through the company's newest ways of marketing strategies.
4. Break-even point, in this case, the cash generated would be sufficient to run and pay the company's expenses.
5. Customer satisfaction: They trust the company's products and services since they are of high quality.

While setting up success metrics in an organization, several considerations must fall in place for its implementation. The road map precisely includes;

• Precision and comprehension; must focus on the priority measures to ensure the organization meets its goals.
• Transparency and data presentation: The audience's information must be adequate and transparent so that the targeted customer can consume and interpret it over time.
• Action promotion by data usage; is mainly linked to the employees in the organization. The data collected in this case is used to achieve goals related to different business segments. 

References 

Avila, C. O. (2019). Novel use of Apple Watch 4 to obtain 3-lead electrocardiogram and detect cardiac ischemia. The Permanente Journal, 23.

Feeley, E. (2021). Can David Really Beat Goliath? A Look into the Anti-Competitive Restrictions of Apple Inc. and Google, LLC. The University of Cincinnati Intellectual Property and Computer Law Journal, 5(1), 5.

Gao, J. (2021). Analysis of Diversification strategy of Apple Inc. Academic Journal of Business & Management, 3(9).

Kurita, J., Sugishita, Y., Sugawara, T., & Ohkusa, Y. (2021). Evaluating Apple Inc mobility trend data related to the COVID-19 outbreak in Japan: Statistical analysis. JMIR public health and surveillance, 7(2), e20335.

Lu, m., & Business, G. (2018). Marketing research on apple Inc. in Chinese market, 67, 78-112

Tilak Naik, G., & Vaikunth Pai, T. (2018). A Study on Products and Services of Apple Inc, 74-235

Turakhia, M. P., Desai, M., Hedlin, H., Rajmane, A., Talati, N., Ferris, T., ... & Perez, M. V. (2019). Rationale and design of a large-scale, app-based study to identify cardiac arrhythmias using a smartwatch: The Apple Heart Study. American heart journal, 207, 66-75.