(My new column is out in The Drum.)
Apple’s Vision Pro $600m failure shows the importance of market orientation
Apple just learned a $600m lesson in how companies can be too product-oriented and not market-oriented enough.
That is how much revenue the company will roughly lose after it recently cut sales projections for the $1,500 Vision Pro VR headset in half from around 800,000 to 400,000.
And it is not only Apple. Nearly every tech giant has developed some type of VR headset or smart glasses product in recent years – only to see sales never going anywhere.
Why? It is a problem of business orientation. A recent Forbes headline summarized the problem perfectly: ‘Apple’s Vision Pro is amazing, but nobody wants one.’
But what exactly is a business orientation, why is it important, and what can marketers learn from it? Let’s dive into the actual reality – not the virtual one.
What are business orientations?
Every business or organization has a goal. For-profit companies generally want to maximize their values for their shareholders. One way by which a business chooses to achieve that goal is to have an overall orientation from the beginning.
Think of “orientation” as a guiding principle or approach. It is what is most important to the business and what it values the most – and it determines what the marketing department does. Here are some of the major ones.