Image courtesy of gotetrunks

Last weekend, I was at the Singapore PC Show with my girlfriend as she wanted to buy a iPod speaker for herself. She had her 2nd generation iPod Touch during one of the IT Show last year and now Epic Centre (Apple Company) is already selling their 3rd generation iPod Touch. All of you should know that if any device or equipment can continue selling for a few generations means that there are definitely demand from the crowd that keep it going. However, whenever there are new generation of goods coming out to replace the old ones, the older generation models will definitely be selling at a much lower price compared to the new ones. Normal product owners will just sell their older goods at a discounted price at some warehouse or conference shows. However, what I saw at this current PC Show was something different and amazing marketing techniques by Apple Company. They were having an auction for their 1st generation iPod Touch at the PC Show and the starting price is $50 dollars. Every time a person raises their hand to increase the bid price, the host will increase $5 dollars and anyone can called a higher price to win their competitor bidder.

A normal 8GB iPod Touch is selling at $308 and this price has remained the same for quite some time already. However, something interesting about this auction was that people are willing to bid for this 1st generation iPod Touch without any warranty up to the price of $265 and more. However, the host stop the bidders from continuing the bid as he mentioned that if the bid price is more than that, it was not considered as an auction anymore. Therefore, he will come out with a solutions of checking with his boss to let all the 3 final bidders get their iPod Touch at $265. This is actually a great marketing plan to entice the customers as everyone is involved in the process of the auction. You can hear people saying why will someone get a 1st generation iPod Touch without any warranty at all at such a high price when they can get the latest model at just $50 more. This shows that there are definitely buyers out there that will perform funny actions to buy what they want but what’s really interesting is how Apple Company sell off their old goods as they did not really do it the normal way like what other company do and that’s why this company is so successful with some many raving fans buying their products.

Cheers
Javier

P.S. Hope I have shared something interesting for you to think through whether you can do things differently like how Apple Company did