In this article, I will tell the story of a marketing campaign that I recently heard of. The story of what can at first appear as a revolutionary marketing idea in a time of great digitalization but is much more a giant marketing fail.
Who are the protagonists of this story ?
The first one, I believe you all know : the technology giant brand Apple. Founded in 1976, has become a leader on the market of new technologies. The brand created through the years its own unique marketing skills.Through their technological devices, they developed apps but also unique softwares for its products. Among them, the media player software iTunes.
The second one is the Irish music band U2, famous worldwide for several decades. Each of their release is an event, listened by all generations all around the world.
This way, the promise of this partnership between this two giant was an event, made during one of Apple annual event to announced its innovations.
In September 2014, a huge marketing campaign was launched live at the Apple event in Cupertino, California. During this event, Apple launched announced the release of its new iPhone 6 and Apple Watch. For this special occasion, a unique marketing campaign was designed. Indeed, at the end of the conference, the famous Irish brand U2 was invited on stage. In front of hundreds of audiences, Tim Cook and the Bono, the leader of the group announced the special release of their new album: Songs of innocence hand to hand with Apple. This new album was after this event available one month earlier on iTunes (the Apple app to listen to music and media content) for free to its 500 million users.
For the first time, a music app had a monopoly on a media product, and for free! For us, this seems insane. How both parties will be able to earn money in this campaign. At that time, it was an excellent idea: Apple will increase its numbers of iTunes users while U2 will be able to make a clever marketing move and perhaps touch more people.
So, what fail in this campaign ?
At the end, this marketing campaign was a total failure. Available for free, many users found those songs in their playlist without deliberately choosing to have it. They were « forced to listen to it » as people couldn’t delete the songs from their playlist, so the songs stayed on the app in a shuffle. Rather than becoming famous for this new marketing campaign, apple’s iTunes service lost subscribers and U2 became one of the most hated bands in the United States. This bad buzz was also among the artists. Many famous music bands of that time criticized this release. Indeed, music was only considered as a content or a product to gain consumers and not as an artistic creation. For several artists it became a discrediting of the work in the music industry.
“At first I thought this was just an internet squall, but quickly realised we’d bumped into a serious discussion about big tech.”
Bono, lead vocalist of U2
One week later, facing this critic but also the many complaints from iTunes users, Apple was forced to upload to their website a tutorial to learn how to remove the album from their music app. A true admission of their mistake from the tech brand. This event is remembered as the worst ranking of an album from the group U2 in the United States where the iTunes market share was the biggest.
Sources :
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