Amazon is directly targeting Apple’s iPad 2 with its latest Kindle ad. The main argument? Price.
The ad goes like this: A man walks alongside a pool in a nice summer holiday vacation setting. He’s desperately trying to make out things on the display of his tablet, shielding it from the sun with his hand. Walking past a woman lying on a sunlounger, he notices her reading on the current eInk Kindle.
That’s when Amazon’s pitch really starts. She explains to him that she couldn’t care less about whether the sun is shining or not, as her Kindle doesn’t suffer from screen glare. He then makes an argument that at least he can watch video on his iPad — if he can see the screen, DUH! — which she counters by saying that she has a Kindle Fire for that. She continues to explain that for the price of one iPad, she bought three Kindles for her family, two eInk models and a Kindle Fire.
The ad might be petty, but it’s also smart.
Although this kind of comparison is very effective when targetting inexperienced customers, it is also petty and clearly positions both the eInk Kindles as well as the Kindle Fire as devices inferior to the iPad for anything else but the things advertised.
The reason the ad is smart? It showcases the Kindle’s strengths: readability in bright sunlight — while not mentioning that the Kindle Fire suffers from the same limitations in sunlight as the iPad — and of course, price point. This way Amazon tries to make customers associate only the positive aspects of each Kindle model with the brand Kindle.
The ad also smartly ignores that the iPad is the computationally superior device not just by its specifications, but also by the abundance of apps Apple’s ecosystem offers. Amazon doesn’t get into this, and shows — like Apple usually does — the things the Kindle is meant for and is good at.
The third thing that’s really smart from Amazon’s approach is discussing only the consumption related aspects of the devices. The fact that the iPad excels at creation, too, something which the Kindle Fire hasn’t yet proved to be useable for, is being purposefully ignored in the ad.
All in all this is a well made advertisement that’s surely going to sell a couple of Kindles to people who have trouble distinguishing tablets from one another, or don’t think they have use for an iPad.
Hat tip to Mac Life
