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http://www.insanely-great.com/news.php?id=1337
Apple: IY's the Brand, Stupid
By Remy Davison, Insanely Great Mac
December 4th 2002
Marketing, not innovation, keeps the Mac alive, say marketing and ad people.
Wired has followed up on their previous article looking at the reasons why Mac users
are so devoted to the platform.
Reason? It's the brand.
Former CEO John Sculley and others speak of Apple as a great 'marketing company'.
Without marketing, Apple would be nothing, argue some commentators cited in the
article.
""Macintosh was always bigger than the product," Steve Hayden, one of the creators of
the famous 1984 commercial. says in the Wired article. "We thought of it as an
ideology, a value set.
Critics of branding and marketing weigh into the discussion. For author Naomi Klein,
Apple no longer sells product, it sells an 'image'; it sells dreams and aspirations.
One marketing man, Marc Gobe, goes further still:
""Without the brand, Apple would be dead, Absolutely. Completely. The brand is all
they've got. The power of their branding is all that keeps them alive. It's got
nothing to do with products."
According to some commentators, Apple is an example of "emotional branding", whose
other exemplars include Target and Lexus. These brands, says the article, are "loved".
Analysis: Target? Loved? Lexus? A Camry with leather seats? Surely not? BMW, Alfa
Romeo, Porsche, the Chev Corvette, the Mustang, we could believe, yes.
Within this half-baked amateur psychologizing, there lie some half-truths. It is true
that Apple was an upstart company in the late 1970s and early 1980s, taking on Big
Blue - and winning - at least for a while.
But if anyone doubts Apple's technical innovation, one need look no further than the
Lisa/Mac GUI. One favorite of mine is Tidbits' 300th issue, entitled '300 Reasons Why
the Mac is Great'. The innovations are all there: first PC company to ship CD-ROM
machines; revolutionary keybpard-forward PowerBook design; the PostScript LaserWriter;
WYSIWYG; genuine plug-and-play; TrueType (where would Windows be without it?); SCSI
Disk Mode; FireWire Target Mode; consumer DVD-R; consumer Wi-Fi; consumer Unix...the
list goes on and on.
Bottom line is this is a tired reiteration of the old Wintroll argument: 'Macs have
pretty cases and are toys' or something along those coherent lines.
Ever wonder why Marketing Guru John Sculley hasn't held a job at Cupertino for a
decade? We don't.
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