Apple marketing story:
Making Marketing Matter: Creating Customer Focus with Overture�s Matt Strain: "working for Apple Computer in Hong Kong in the late �80s where I was hired to grow Apple�s education market. The university computer departments and chancellors were staffed with professional who had been in the field longer than I had been alive. I was selling against �safe� products�IBM�and against competition with much deeper resources.
There are two things that turned this around. I invited one senior representative from each of the five universities (the head of the computer science department or the chancellor of the university) to attend Apple�s University Consortium in Australia. Wives were also invited. This was a meeting attended by the computer science heads from the world�s leading universities.
So, instead of being the new kid on the block selling a risky product, in one case I watched the head of Carnegie Mellon�s computing initiative berate the head of one of Hong Kong�s leading universities for not having a Macintosh lab. The conversation was not about products but about philosophical approaches to education, to offering choice, to being on the cutting edge.
As a follow up to this, I identified individual professors within each of the universities who had a passion for combining education and technology. Within the year, we had Macintosh labs in each of the institutions with teachers and students committed to developing on the platform.
The lesson: leveraging influencers and focusing on customer with passion to help evangelize products. "

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