A research plan for how Apple could realistically break into the game console market.
By: Stanley Carter
Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company specializing in consumer electronics and well-known for their popular smartphones and tablets. The technology company has been involved in the gaming industry for a long time, but it has never been a particularly successful branch off from their usual product lines. Only releasing games on their App Store and on Apple Arcade. Even though Apple is not known for their contribution to the gaming industry; I believe that with the right approach, a video game console created by Apple could be game changing, no pun intended.
Entering the video game console battle between well established companies, Sony and Microsoft, will take a considerable amount of planning and research in order to be successful. The research objectives for this product release are the following: to identify the need for a new competitor in the game console industry, to identify the current interested parties for the new product already in Apple’s ecosystem, and to determine the features and specifications that would gain the attention of the target audience.
Apple has a large target audience because of the popularity of different products and services they offer already, so gathering the information needed would be a simple task with the help with surveys, interviews, and secondary research. In order to identify the need for a new competitor in the game console industry, potential customers with an interest in video gaming outside of Apple’s ecosystem between ages of 18 and 30 would be surveyed. The survey would include questions that would reveal the target market, their interests, and ultimately their opinion on a new console from a new company in the industry.
Long time fans and certain stakeholders would be interviewed in order to gather data on which premade customer profiles would be interested in a new console. Since Sony’s PlayStation, Microsoft’s Xbox, and Nintendo’s Switch are currently the most popular consoles on the market, gathering more personal opinions from current Apple users would be valuable to the conception of the product.
After finding out who would be interested and why, the next research steps would be to identify what features would be needed in order to compete and satisfy the needs of current fans of the brand and gaming. This could be done in multiple ways including the previous methods mentioned and using secondary research. Summarizing the existing research done to target audiences by the company in the past to develop similar strategies to accomplish this goal. Reviewing the competition’s current features and identifying what gaps need to be filled that would please the target audience is key to product development.