Key Success Factors of Apple

Key success factors are significant to future success of industry firms. These factors encompass competencies, market achievements, resources, competitive capabilities and product attributes etc. It is most important for the strategists to be familiar with the external environment in order to distinguish the most important competitive success factors. The KSFs of Apple are given below:

Extensive Research & Development

Apple started the building of Infinite Loop campus and each activity on the campus was constrained to R&D. In the campus every building was named as R&D 1 to R&D 6. Apple increased its workforce by 12,600 employees for the year 2010 as the technology oversize strengthened its R&D activities.

Innovative Activities

Apple is well recognized for its innovative product lines. Over the precedent decade, it has launched 5 sensibly game-changing innovations:

1. The iPod: The stylish MP3 player that started its decade of distraction.
2. The iTunes: Exquisite software with an influential business model that demonstrated that individuals would indeed forfeit for music if the value was fair and the interface was easy enough.
3. The iPhone: Nicknamed the "Jesus Phone" by followers, a Smartphone which three years afterward still hasn’t been harmonized by competitors.
4. The App Exchange: No one desires 98 % of the apps that Apple presents.
5. The Apple Store: The quietest fraction of Apple’s revolution, nowadays near to $2 billion value of products progress throughout Apple revolutionary shops.

Advertising and Differentiation

Throughout the history, Apple has been recognized well for its advertisements, which are planned to imitate a set up of marketing its brands to creative persons. Their most noticeable ad campaigns include the “Super Bowl commercial” 1984, “Think different” 1990s campaign, and the 2000s "iPod people". Apple’s iPod, portable music player, has been showcased as a part of modern art in NY’s Museum of Modern Art.  Nowadays its advertising efforts focuses around “special events", and keynotes at seminars such as the Apple Expo and Mac World Expo.

Well Recognized and Cherished Brand Name

Apple is the king of brand names around the globe and is placed at number one in the US. Apple and Google do a substitute for the international market with Starbucks, IKEA and Skype rounding out the top five. Tiger as well as did the iMac made Apple top on the radar catalog for individual. Apple’s brand name recognition is overturn on the high. 

Retail and Distribution Network

Apple has opened its largest United States store; a building in Boston which imitates Apple’s arrangement to increase its retail ventures at home and abroad. Apple distributes its products through its retail stores; direct sales force, online stores, as well as throughout the third-party resellers, value added resellers and wholesalers. The Apple operated eighty four retail open outlets in 2004. These outlets were selling peripheral products, hardware, software, as well as a range of third-party software and hardware products.

Breadth of Product Line

Apple Inc. deals in the manufacture, marketing and design of personal computers (PCs) and related services, peripherals, software and networking solutions. It has also developed various markets and is engaged in designing a wide range of portable digital music players beside related services and accessories which include the online distribution 3rd party audio and music books.