A lot of people recently have been talking about how brilliant Apple’s marketing has been recently.

I beg to differ. Ironically, the reason that Apple has such great marketing, is that they don’t spend much time thinking about marketing. They spend all their time thinking about their products and making them useful.

Was their buzz generating announcement of the iPhone brilliant marketing? No. Plenty of companies do product announcements before their launch with press releases and all sorts of methods. The iPhone generated buzz because of its features like the user interface (and the benefits those features would provide).

Were the ads they created for the iPhone brilliant? No, they were actually very simple. But they showed brilliant features being used from a first person perspective. They were effective because the iPhone was effective, not because of how the ads were designed.

And of course, one of the least talked about yet most effective forms of marketing that Apple has benefited from, is that their products keep showing up in hands of the right people.

Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, which was one of the best examples of how to use visual aids in a presentation, was inadvertently an ad for Apple. If a Al Gore uses a MacBook, maybe I should too, was the subconscious message.

MacBooks also seem to show up surprisingly often in the Ted Talks, which are a virtual who’s who of people doing the top research and most interesting work anywhere in the world. For example check out New York Times Columnist David Pogue’s hilarious talk on simplicity.

They also seem to be a favorite of celebrities, like Victoria’s Secret models Allesandra Ambrosio and Gisele Bundchen, and regularly show up in the background of press photos. It’s not product placement, these people actually just use Mac’s more than PC’s, despite the numbers being flipped in the regular population.

So what’s the point of all this? People are too focused on Apple’s marketing. Apple isn’t seeing more success lately BECAUSE of their marketing. They are getting effective (and in some cases free marketing) because they don’t focus on marketing. As Steve Jobs says, they focus on creating useful products that people love, and the rest sort of takes care of itself.

Where else have you seen Apple products appearing that provide them with “free advertising”?