Happy Birthday Apple

It’s just a year since mega brand Apple opened its fabulous, shiny new Norwich store – an event that drew massive crowds to Chapelfield Mall, with the first fans lining up just after 7am.

There were no special offers, no tempting discounts, no celebrities – just a store full of impressive technology – and highly-prized special edition t-shirts for the first 1,000 through the doors.

I was in the fortunate position of handling local media relations for the launch and I have to say from a PR perspective, working with such a mega brand was an extremely interesting experience.

As a rule, big names such as Apple let their products do the work for them - they barely need PR. Build it and they will come.

So, they probably weren’t prepared for laid back Norfolk, where a good chunk of local media seemed distinctly unimpressed with the imminent arrival of a global blockbusting brand. Clearly it would take more than ‘the opening of a new shop’ to rock their boat (to make matters worse, the launch coincided with the end of the Norfolk Food Festival and some journalists seemed to think I was talking about the opening of a new fruit and veg shop)….

Thankfully Norfolk’s core of Apple fans needed no encouragement to get up at the crack of dawn for this momentous occasion – giving the local press some great pictures. The t-shirts were gone in an hour and the store’s been packed ever since.

Well, the morale of this story is that there are no certainties in PR – especially when you’re dealing with the regional media. PR might sometimes look like a doddle, but in common with most trades and professions, there’s usually much more to it than meets the eye…