By Ding Gang

When the iPhone was just launched in the US market, I asked a young American guy, "Why buy an iPhone when you already have a cell phone?" He simply replied, "Because many friends are using it."

When the iPad arrived in China in mid September, I tossed the same question to a young Chinese guy, and got exactly the same answer. 

Chinese use the recently  coined term chaoren, referring to those who stand at the front lines of fashion, with new clothes and amazing gadgets. The iPad has been every chaoren's new toy since it entered the market.

iPads and iPhones are widely seen as innovative technologies. Apple has well built its brand as a cutting-edge manufacturer of gadgets that everybody wants. 

The products themselves have become a mark of fashion as surely as the latest shoes or this season's favorite dress.

What is fashion? It's irrational, appealing, and compelling. It indicates people are following a trend, rather than thinking about what they truly need.

Apple's products are not cheap, and they're often inconvenient. For instance, you cannot install pirated software and download music. Users have to pay to watch movies and Apple's products have a hard time with Chinese word-processors.

But that means little to fashion victims desperate to get their hands on the neatest new gear.

Let's look at a group of statistics that reveal how fashionable Apple is.

From March to September this year, Apple users across the world downloaded 35 million paid e-books, the same number of free e-books, as well as 11.7 billion songs, 450 million TV episodes and 100 million films.

These Apple products, besides having performing the functions of ordinary laptops, cell phones and MP3 players, have an irrational lure all of their own.

Those Apple fans standing in long queues to buy a new Apple product, and those young people who play with their Apple toys on subway trains or at coffee shops are not really using them to do something.

These people are not short of notebooks or other alternatives. What they are pursuing is the feeling of coolness. It's like wearing a very fashionable coat, or walking proudly in the streets in a slogan-emblazoned T-shirt. Coolness is what Apple is selling, not functionality.

Fashion needs to be unique. A regular product should first satisfy the needs of consumers or users, and then have good quality and reasonable price.

However, such a conventional idea is way inadequate for fashion chasers.

Imagine, if Apple only tries to adapt to people's needs, it would never come up with so many novel products that can lead consumers' tastes.

In marketing, seeing consumers as gods and cautiously satisfying their needs is one way, and compelling consumers to chase after the corporation's innovations is another.

When tons of enterprises are pondering over how to improve product quality, function and services through innovation, and how to expand market by squeezing price space, Apple has focused on how to channel fashions in all these elements.

When innovation joins hands with fashion, a new form of consumption is born.

However, all kinds of fashion can appear outdated one day. For Apple, the biggest challenge is how to create continuous fashion with a steady flow of innovative ideas.

The author is a senior editor with the People's Daily. dinggang@globaltimes.com.cn