Understanding Creative Strategy: How do you like them apples?
Dismantling Apple’s brand essentialism myth
The history of the Apple brand is far more meandering and complex than many people care to admit. It’s so meandering that it’s quite challenging to tell it chronologically, so, let’s look at overlapping and shifting themes instead.
When people talk about Apple as a brand, they often envision a minimalistic premium lifestyle brand, but that’s a relatively recent incarnation.
Sadly, my brain absorbs marketing communications like a sponge and then loses sleep over incongruent thinking, so here are some “Apples” that may surprise you.
Early days: user-friendly Apple
Early days, Apple tried to be synonymous with user-friendliness, simplicity, practicality, and having a positive impact on daily life with products that were significantly more user-friendly than the majority of business computers available at the time (although other home computers existed. Shout out to my Commodore 64 crew). Combined with their popularising graphic user interfaces (building on work done at Xerox) this became the essence of Apple products.
The slower-than-you-think rise of “cool apple”
During the 80s did the former approach and their emphasis on bundling creative software attracted a “liberal arts”-oriented crowd, which contributed to the brand’s burgeoning “cool” factor. A major contributing factor is the fact that between 1987 and 1993, Photoshop, a huge disruptive force in graphic design, was available only on Macs.
This made it easier to increasingly shift in the late ’90s from being purely about user-friendliness to also being just “cool.” Apple was already the darling of designers and the creative industry, but this didn’t mean success. When Steve Jobs, pushed out in 1985 due to tensions over the disappointing sales of the Mac, came back in 1997, Apple was in dire straits. But Jobs saw something others didn’t, possibly influenced by what he saw at Pixar (Toy Story came out in 1995). One of his first steps? Forging a deep alliance with Microsoft. I bet you didn’t see that coming.
Jobs didn’t immediately create a contemporary Apple on his return. That one emerged over the noughties, thanks to the success of the iPod and, later, the game-changing disruptive power of the iPhone. People talking about the brand would still echo the user-friendliness or some evolved cooler ethos based on it, as crystallised in Ridley Scott’s iconic 1984 Apple advert (Chiat/Day). At the time, reverse-engineered brand frameworks so commonly used by consultancies referring to Apple, talk about freedom, rebellion, and “man over machine” and portray Apple as a Promethean force, linking stealing fire to the fruit of knowledge etc.
You know, like consultants would.
(“Empowerment” was a popular brand theme around the dotcom era. Especially in tech and telecoms. It is still an inescapable trope of tech, as it has been since we started telling stories about harnessing fire. It was replaced by “Passion” once LoveMarks polluted enough brains, before “Purpose” swallowed the industry whole).
The new iMac and iLife’s walled garden
Before the success of the iPod and the minimal aesthetic, the focus was on “the new iMac.” Not the MacBook (air wouldn’t come out for a few more years (2008)). These were the ones available in vibrant gelatinous colours (G3, 1998) and a screen that didn’t really follow you when you looked at it, but it was fun to think about (G4 with flexible arm, 2002). Around the same time, to promote “new Macs”, they also market the newly collected iLife suite(2003). Because ecosystem. During that era, user-friendliness is still a significant element of the brand. It is a long Apple tradition to make a big deal about revolutionary plugs and later charge a lot for the trouble they cause.
Around that time, the evolution of Microsoft’s Windows and Office was picking up pace, and new versions of Photoshop showed a fairly identical levels of user-friendliness across Macs and PCS, which often had superior power (ask gamers). I belong to a minority who used both for years (a PC “rig” at home and a Mac at work). Both environments had their mix of brilliance and infuriating quirks (iOS devices are like a Ferrari with its hood welded shut). And yet, Apple fans were still snubbing PC’s for being “complicated”, which Apple joyfully leveraged in its “I’m a Mac; I’m a PC” campaign (2006–2009, TBWA). Most creative-industry Apple fans of the time never really worked with Windows machines — because the birth of creative software, and Photoshop in particular, meant their entire environment used Macs. The minority of designers who moved to PCs in the noughties, primarily for web design and development, discovered the dirty secret: Photoshop was pretty much the same on Windows, only it ran faster.
There are other dissonances to the myth of user-friendliness. My favourite is the fact that first-generation iPods came with a click-wheel that definitely had a learning curve and didn’t follow the fundamental UX principle of “intuitive=familiar”. For example, you had to gently stroke the click wheel in a circle to change the volume level. Clockwise and anti-clockwise. Cool and sensual? Yes. Intuitive? Not after decades of a triangle symbol with plus and minus button/s on pretty much all remote controls. Ask any CHI/UX pro. The iPod Shuffle switched back to the old system — To conserve space, probably because there was less need for novelty by then. Those early click-wheels were also quite prone to fail together with the little hard disks inside that weren’t solid-state yet, and no one told people that jogging with them was the best way to crash them.
Cool like a cool apple (almost never Apple)
The rise of Apple as we know it today starts with the Think Different campaign (TBWA/Chiat/Day, 1997), which included “Here’s to the crazy ones…” which was one of those obnoxious manifesto ads that worked because Apple was already cool. When I share this one or Honda’s “The Impossible Dream” (W&K 2005) with GenZ colleagues, they often cringe, and I suspect if a brand tried exploiting science and politics heroes in that way today, it would get “cancelled” (not necessarily bad). Cool — an ever-moving target, innit.
When Jon Steel mentions the briefing day for what would become “Think Different” in his book (his agency didn’t win that pitch, btw). He quotes Jobs as saying:
This is a favourite quote of mine. Its ability to capture the full triangulation of a brand strategy and a lucid brief in a few simple sentences is an absolute inspiration. It nails Jobs’ positioning strategy, and the campaign reflects it.
But notice that some older elements are no longer the focus. He’s not going for the same ethos he went for in the early days, even if “1984” (from the same agency) can be seen as a conceptual bridge, so at the ad level, the two facets work together.
The iconic white headphone silhouette iPod launched in 2001 which is still very much the “Think Different” era, goes for a minimalist trendy look celebrating the novel white earbuds and echoing club poster aesthetic. In fact, many campaigns since are (less iconic) feature-driven ads. Occasionally, properly demo ads. Apple does those very well (including when they get things wrong. Looking at you industrial crusher iPad ad. We’ll come back to you at the end.).
Apple has loved product demos throughout its history, often cleverly celebrating a single feature. I’d bet most marketers would advise against this strategy if it weren’t Apple. An extreme example is that last year, they dedicated a whole campaign to the iPhone becoming available in yellow.
(shout out to Adam Sayah who reviewed this at the time)
But here’s the genius Mac Air single-feature demo from 2008.
User friendly? Creative? Innovation? or simply sexy?
Apple’s success is no longer thanks to friendly design or technological innovations, as this week’s launch event and those of recent years show again. On some level, it never was. The iPod, for example, emerged from a novel use of new, smaller hard drives. While there were other MP3 players on the market, the iPod’s triumph was propelled by elegance and, more importantly, by its seamless integration with the Apple ecosystem, notably iTunes. iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone, and its early touch keyboard wasn’t great (most users could type much faster on their Blackberry), but it had the App Store. Ecosystem. Which has grown since (watch, tv etc). Through the years, a large part of Apple’s value has been driven by its ability to lock users into its ecosystem. But hey, Microsoft also discovered the power of the app-store-type economy only with its promotion of Windows as the ultimate development platform. It’s a large part of their success, too. Developers, developers, developers, (Balmer, 1999) remember? Apple is a master at “learning to shave using other peoples’ beards”.
Scott Galloway describes contemporary Apple as a “loins brand,” indicating a premium brand that people desire because they believe it brands themselves as desirable. This is a deeper notion than the professor’s typical clickbait label suggests, and it includes multiple layers like being trendy, in the know, at the cutting edge, understanding quality, and being able to afford it. However, my point is that other aspects of Apple are waning. “User-friendly” and “creativity” take a backseat. It’s no longer “for the crazy ones” and hasn’t been so for at least a decade. Perhaps it’s “for the slick social media influencers” as long as they don’t wear those dorky Vision headsets (which the professor detests).
So what’s the lesson here?
Many strategists and brand managers still treat their brand only as “the unchanging element,” trapping its definitions in convoluted onions, pyramids, keyholes, fish, and whatnot. This “Brand Essentialism” that Feldwick critiques so well in WDTPS has become a real bugbear for me.
The evolution of what’s currently the biggest brand on earth contains more twists and turns than is widely acknowledged. Managers and strategists often latch onto singular aspects of Apple’s brand strategy, and shove them, crudely reverse-engineered, into a framework, but the real picture is much more complex. Apple’s history demonstrates that brand strategy is not just about one idea or approach; it’s about a dynamic evolution that responds to changing consumer behaviours and market conditions.
Which brings us also to… One final bonus twist:
So that Apple crusher ad, also in a strange way, bordering on single feature demo, which LinkedIn users delighted in flagging as “even Apple can fail!” and “How could they not see that!?”. The interesting thing is that the ad still tested quite well for Apple owners (according to system 1, and the reverse even better for all, although that might be down to the product and logo coming at the beginning) but simultaneously caused such online and media furore (to a degree with that ageing creative elite segment), that they apologised and pulled it. So, is that a cool brand or an uncool brand?
Because while you don’t advertise for the elite, you often bow gracefully before its judgment as it has the clout to create “media myths of public uproar” (bordering on moral panic/amplification spirals, if you want to get dark and sociology-nerd about it) that go viral on our rage-fuelled social media. By the time people see it, they see it through a different prism than intended. How’s that as a nuanced twist to the emerging dogmas “Don’t sell to system 1 using system 2” and “listen to the ordinary people, not the urban elites”?
Always suspect paradigms that turn into dogmas.
Life is messy. Business is messy. So is creative strategy. So is marketing. And so is the evolution of any brand. Let alone the world’s biggest one.
That’s just how cultural myths work, and the best brands become cultural myths.
Some of my other thoughts:
About AI
About creative strategy
Join my mailing list to keep in touch, like, share, follow, wink, pat my head, hit that update bell on the profile, hit that perfect beat boy, dance like nobody’s watching, dance like everybody’s watching, love like you’ve never been hurt, hurt because you loved like you’ve never been hurt, have fun storming the castle, work with me.
