Apple's iPhone, in my view, is a case study on marketing by buzz. There's a lot to learn from this for other brands.
Economist had this to write about Apple's iPhone marketing strategy:
The actual launch day, June 29th, became known as “iDay” among Apple cultists. Queues started forming days in advance at many of Apple's 164 shops in America. Depending on the location, the scenes had flavours of Woodstock, Mardi Gras, or—in Silicon Valley's Palo Alto, say—an Apple programmers' conference. Pizza deliverymen did a brisk trade catering to the waiting masses. Steve (“the Woz”) Wozniak, who co-founded Apple but has since parted ways with it, could have got an iPhone through connections, but waited in line just for the experience.
- The first shoppers to emerge victorious were cheered as heroes and brandished their trophies for the cameras.
- AT&T's rivals, Verizon and Sprint, issued “talking points” to their salespeople, with helpful hints for impugning the iPhone's divinity. They lost customers anyway.
Honchos in all sorts of industries have long studied keynote speeches by Steve Jobs, Apple's boss, for ways to cast spells on audiences; now they also need to work out how he outsourced his product marketing to an entire nation of volunteers.