Sinclair as well as IBM PC Junior and other marketers were up against Apple’s 1984 Macs. These companies positioned their very limited product lines for people that thought were extremely dumb…waaaaaay too dumb to use a Mac. But the wanna bees were never able to compete with the 1984 Macs. Initially they were in the same price range as Mac’s, but they very quickly began very drastically dropping prices, and they became a money loosing disaster.
Here’s just one example of a PC Junior ad campaign. Good ads, very, very terrible product.
Hmm… so in a way the expensive software were juxtaposed with the Little Tramp character symbolizing the plucky but poor lower class. One could take this marketing analogy too far and conclude the campaign was teasing the less fortunate with piles of merchandise/wealth they cannot posses?
(OK. Time for me to get some sleep before any more Deep Thoughts come spilling out.)
When I was working in ad sales at this time, and IBM was one of my clients. Like most super large scale $$$&&&& companies, pricing started out being extremely competitive, and Macs cost more than IBM charged for PC Jr. hardware
At the time, IBM also had a very, very much humongously bigger advertising budget than Macs. And Charlie Chaplin never worked for cheap, and he ran in multiple ads on TV, print and out of home. In fact, The entire IBM print and broadcast campaign ran for well over a year in multimedia, and think about how much less Apple’s one shot “1984” broadcast cost. It flew the ball waaaaayyyyyyyy out of the park.
Charlie Chaplin died in 1977. He didn’t work for IBM at all.
In 1981, IBM licensed Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” character from Bubbles Incorporated, S.A., the Chaplin family organization that holds the copyrights to Chaplin’s works and likeness. The actor who performed in the commercials was Billy Scudder, a professional mime.
The campaign was still a total humongous, ground breaking disaster. It would have been even one if IBM managed to bring Chaplin himself back from the dead.
The PC Junior was a disaster from day one. It didn’t have a hard drive. It cost a fortune. And it didn’t have, or even run, any apps. It had an exceptionality awfully designed keyboard.
Most important to IBM, PC Junior never turned anything even resembling a profit. It began hemorrhaging large amounts of cash from day one.
“Ben Reitzes, an analyst at UBS Investment Research, said in a July research note that the business would be sold. He noted the PC business, which accounts for about 10 percent of IBM’s total sales, loses money.”
“Despite a flashy debut and a strong technology core, the PCjr flopped in the market. Consumers were not as attracted by the IBM name as business had been. Price was a major factor. The PCjr cost about the same as the Coleco Adam, but for the price, the Adam included two tape drives, a printer, and software. The PCJr was twice as expensive as the Commodore 64. With the exception of the Apple II, it was possible to purchase a complete system (computer, disk drive, and printer) from almost any of IBM’s competitors for less money. However, criticism of the system focused on the “chiclet” keyboard. Similar to that of a pocket calculator, the small keys were cheap and difficult to use for touch typing. IBM later replaced this with a wireless conventional-sized keyboard. But it could only be used two or three feet away from the machine and drained batteries quickly.”
The Chaplin campaign was for the original IBM PC, starting in 1981, not for the PCjr (released in 1984). It was considered an extremely successful campaign.
(There may have been PCjr ads that used the character—I don’t remember how long the overall campaign was—but the campaign as a whole was focused on the original PC.)
Another issue that killed the ads is that brand new corporations were rapidly and very successfully entering the PC marketplace, including, but not limited to Dell, Compac and Lenovo. And “1984” was most definitely like “1984.”
Things got so bad that IBM sold their entire PC division to Lenovo, one of their brand spanking new, and successful, rivals.
The sale to Lenovo happened 20 years after the introduction of the PCjr.
IBM actually did quite well in establishing the ThinkPad as a distinctive laptop before laptops became as commoditized as desktops. But by the time of the sale, pretty much all Windows/ PC machines were commodities and IBM did not want to be in the commodity hardware business.
(Apple doesn’t want to be in the commodity hardware business either. That’s why it got out of the printer business and the WiFi business. But macOS and iOS mean their primary hardware lines do not have this problem.)
