One of Amazon.com’s biggest assets is its frontpage, viewed by millions of people on a daily basis, and, while times are getting rougher and competition tougher, the company uses it to openly criticize Apple’s new iPad.
In an attempt to push kindle fire HD sales, Amazon employs pretty aggressive marketing speech and uses a heavily tweaked side-by-side comparison:
- “Much More for Much Less”
- The Kindle Fire is “stunning”, the iPad mini is “standard”
- iPad mini only having a “low resolution” display
- “Watch HD movies and TV” “No HD movies or TV”. The phrasing here is very clever. To a technically competent individual it parses as “no HD content on iPad Mini, only standard definition”. But the “and TV”/”or TV” phrasing means that an average consumer might assume that you can’t get any TV shows on iPad Mini. (Source)
- The screen of the kindle fire is deliberately shown in black with the background the same colour as the bezel. This makes the screen appear bigger as it is unclear where the bezel ends and the screen begins.
- The iPad mini has been photoshopped, it’s not the iOS which ships with the iPad mini nor has any promotional shots of Apple been used.
- Ultra-fast MIMO Wi-Fi vs. blank space not stating the fact that there is Wifi in the iPad just not as fast.
These tactics are nothing new though. Apple themself is the master of setting the conversations points during their keynote speeches. Take the iPhone 4 launch as an example, a slightly higher resolution screen but significantly smaller than the existing competition. Their framing, with retina branding switched the existing conversation from screen size to PPI, a metric that had never been discussed before. Apple competitors were framed as “worse” if they included a screen with the same resolution but bigger.
Apple would never even show a competitor on their site because they are the market leader but see “Mac vs. PC” what happens when they are not.
More discussion here: http://hackerne.ws/item?id=4711786