Apple, U2… and permission marketing!
There’s nothing particularly unusual about closing a product launch with live music. Doing so with a performance from U2, one of the most popular bands on the planet, is a little less so, and beyond the reach of most companies. And if, aside from paying Bono and the band their hefty fee, you decide to dig into your pockets to give away their latest album to your half a billion clients, the least you could expect is that this commercial gesture was a success and that everybody was happy with you.
Instead, what seemed like a good idea at the time has prompted an avalanche of complaints and insults from users accusing Apple of spamming, some of whom have even set up a website called Who is U2? Wired has gone so far as to publish an article entitled “How to Purge Your iTunes of That Horrid U2 Album”, forcing Apple to announce that it allows users to remove Songs of Innocence, and creating a support page for users to do so.
What went so wrong? In June of last year, Samsung offered all owners of its Galaxy SIII, Galaxy S4, and Galaxy Note models access to the new Jay Z record a few days before it went on sale: this proved a success and there were no complaints. What Samsung did was to offer an app to download the album, meaning that only people who cared about Jay Z’s music would do so.
Apple seems to have done something similar, but hasn’t. What the company did was to automatically put U2’s album in the space that its clients have on their personal cloud: not all users were able to find the recording, because iTunes, which is surely one of the worst programs of all times, only allows the album to appear on your available list if you have activated Show iTunes in the Cloud purchases option in your Preferences, although many others did in fact find it, and didn’t like what they found. One thing is somebody giving you a free album, but coming into your home or your car to leave it there without asking you first… is something else.
Why would somebody react in this way to receiving a gift? In the first place, because when you have half a billion clients, you’re going to find that, regardless of how popular the group whose music you’re giving away is or has been, many people will either not have heard of them, or don’t like them, or think that only their early albums were any good. A music collection is a very private thing, a place where only what we like is stored: many people use iTunes’ shuffle feature to play music randomly, and they don’t want something popping up that they didn’t know was there.
At the same time, we have to bear in mind the fallout from The Fappening hacked photos stored on the cloud scandal: now is not a good time to be reminding people how easy it is for Apple to access their files, even if it’s to leave a gift.
Apple’s mistake can perhaps best be understood in the context of Seth Godin’s 1999 book Permission Marketing. Regardless of whether Apple’s customers are fans of the company, there are limits to the permissions they will grant. You can allow Apple to send you emails, updates for programs, and plenty more, but you probably won’t appreciate the company leaving a file in your personal storage area or device.
Permission marketing is a well-established concept: so why did Apple make such a gaffe? Obviously, its goal in paying U2 an undisclosed sum and in committing a $100 million marketing campaign for their record was about more than just giving its customers a free record: it wanted the world to know that it was behind the biggest album launch ever. It wanted to show that Apple had the potential to revive the moribund idea of an album, to set off a new golden age of music where Apple customers, thanks to having bought and integrated Beats, would have privileged access to the work of a select group of musicians signed up by the brand; and this requires more than just giving something away: the idea is to make history.
For U2, this has all proved largely beneficial: leaving aside the brouhaha over Apple’s methods, more than 33 million users have heard the album (the band’s previous release, 2009’s No line on the horizon, sold 1.1 million copies in the US, and 5 million worldwide) and many of its older albums have attracted renewed interest. But for the band’s manager, Guy Oseary, to simply tell people that: “it’s a gift, and if you don’t like it, remove it,” is not good enough, and not just because of U2’s role in all this, but Apple’s approach: if there are clients out there who think you have exceeded the permission they grant you, then you’ve done something wrong.
(En español, aquí)
