How to dominate perception, without spending a single dollar on hype

The world is abuzz with chatter regarding the soon to be announced Apple Tablet. The raw numbers in Alchemy are amazing. It reminds me of a recent article I ran across recently – “How Apple gets it all wrong, and still is on top“. Basically, the gist of the article is that Apple does nothing that we’ve learned you should do in the Social Media/Marketing 2.0 world and still dominates. Think about it.  Apple doesn’t blog. Steve Jobs doesn’t tweet. There are no promotional messages coming out of Facebook. Apple doesn’t buy SEM. In fact, the only advertising Apple freely spends on is print display, billboards (gasp!), online display and television – all 4 decidedly 1.0 in the marketing world. Yet, despite not using anything 2.0, Apple and Apple products still control the social media conversation. Now, as the article correctly concludes, it doesn’t hurt to have one of the greatest brands and a seemingly never ending supply of hit zeitgeist products.

So that leads me to the tablet.  Let’s look at the numbers shall we? At Maroon Alchemy we routinely compile the top 25 positive and negative drivers around Apple’s perception we actually do it for everyone as well. Over the course of the last 30 days (remember, that includes a bit of post holiday euphoria), 12 of out of Apple’s Top 25 positive perception drivers are all tablet related. As someone who has recently closely watched several major product launches that is astounding. Verizon didn’t get there with the Droid. Microsoft didn’t get even come close with Windows 7 and Google fell short with Nexus One.

What makes this more impressive is that Apple accomplished this without spending a single dollar on hype. Heck, the company still won’t confirm it is announcing a tablet tomorrow… which is, of course, part of the hype. Granted, once the annoucement is made we’ll see the Apple advertising engine shift into action but again, you’re going to see it via those Marketing 1.0 platforms.

To put this all into context, the first time we saw the “tablet” appear in the the Apple Top 25 was back in August when it debuted at #18. Now, it accounts for just shy of 50% of its positive drivers. To top it off, it isn’t like Apple isn’t already swimming in really good positive news. Also, it should be noted that no tablet related perception drivers appears in Apple’s Top 25 Negative list at this point.

Stay tuned…