While looking around at Internet Retailer today, I stumbled across an article on some recently announced numbers from Apple's iTunes Store.  Preferring to go straight to the source, I dug around in Apple's press release archives and found the announcement that was made on January 9, 2007.

According to the press release, as of January 9, Apple has sold more than 2 billion songs from the iTunes Store since it opened.  2 billion.  That's a lot of music.  In addition, the release says that Apple has sold a billion of those songs in the last year alone.  But iTunes sells mores than music.  In addition to tunes, Apple says it has sold 50 million episodes of popular television shows, and over 1.3 million full-length movies.  With those figures, Apple is laying claim to the title of "largest online video store".

Apple also released some financial information for the first quarter of fiscal 2007, which just ended in December.  Apple broke previous records with quarterly revenue of $7.1 billion and profit of $1 billion.  The company said it's seen a near 30% increase in Macintosh computer shipments and 50% growth of iPod shipments during the quarter.  And they ended the quarter with almost $12 billion in cash on hand.  That's not too bad for a company that many had written off as defunct a decade ago.

So what is it that has made Apple recover so successfully in the past 10 years?  What has Apple done that the rest of us can mimic?  Sure, they've released some great products.  But much of Apple's success is based on marketing.  As I've said before, the company does a great job of making people think that they need Apple products.

How do they do it?  What do you think Apple's strongest marketing tactics are?