Blackfriars' Marketing: A new line of financial and strategy research: Analyzing Apple

Microsoft has Directions on Microsoft. Now Blackfriars is proud to announce that Apple has Analyzing Apple, a new line of strategy analysis and financial projections focused entirely on Apple Inc. You can read the description and purchase our first report Beyond the Computer here, or you can always get to our products through the Blackfriars product store.

Think of Analyzing Apple as a cross between a financial newsletter and industry analyst research. The pieces are short (8-pages), but include detailed financial projections and graphics. Six times a year (four times the week prior to earnings reports plus two special reports around WWDC and a predicted September special event), we'll publish an analysis package that includes the report, a spreadsheet with all the projection figures, and Keynote and PowerPoint slide presentations of the same data.

The target audience for this is investors who want to better understand the company and where it is going, traders who want another opinion before earnings come out, and anyone who doesn't want to spend the time and effort figuring out what's going on in one of the most close-mouthed companies in high-tech.

We heard from our survey that our readers don't want to see this as a premium priced product. So our introductory price for this product is $35 -- about the same price as a book. Now, I know that's more than the average of $15 that most readers wanted to pay, but we're adding what we think is a creative wrinkle to the business model: the text and Web graphics from the report will be published online paginated with ads two to three weeks after the report is released. Online readers will not receive the report PDF, the spreadsheet, or the presentation materials; those are only available with the purchased product. But they will get the full analysis and graphics to view at their leisure, supported by advertising. Our bet is that this unique dual offer will allow readers to trade-off time versus money according to their individual interests, needs, and budgets.

As an aside, these reports will also be available through our six international distributors, so if your company already has a relationship with ResearchandMarkets.com, MarketResearch.com, Source Media, or other consolidators, feel free to work through them.

To give you a sample of what I think is the high quality of the product I'm including some screen shots of both some of the report layout and the Keynote presentation. We're both excited and proud of this new extension to our business, but we'd love your feedback as well. So if you have thoughts or comments, please send them to us, and we'll do our best to address them.

One final point: for those of you who purchase the product, be aware that we don't have an automated sales process for these reports yet, so it can be several hours before you receive your package by email after your order. We'll do our best to get them to you as quickly as possible, but we hope you'll understand that we do have to eat and sleep on occasion.