Brand and the Cult of Apple
What exactly is a brand? It’s more than a logo or a slogan, a name for your company or product. Brand is a collection of ideas, experiences, and values associated with an organization, company, product or service. That’s the ‘book’ version of what brand means. In addition, I think, brand is how people perceive the sum of all those things. And, that can be very powerful for a company.
Identifying what your brand is and ensuring that it drives everything that your business does is imperative to building your business and retaining long-term, loyal customers. Consistent, quality experiences will help your business maintain customers even during tough times or a misstep.
Apple does an amazing job at building a brand that has gained a sort of cult following. Whether you’re a fan of Apple or not, it’s difficult to deny the power of their brand-building efforts. In fact, a 2008 brandchannel.com survey revealed Apple to be the most influential brand, the brand most likely to revolutionize the branding industry and a brand that survey participants say they can’t live without.
So, the question is, what are some things we can all learn from Apple?
Well for one, they’re great at tapping into the psychological and emotional reasons as to why we buy. Rather than the product being the hero in the story, they position the person using the product as the hero. Take their early iPod® commercials. There were no mentions of the product’s technical specifications, dimensions, capabilities, etc. The commercials just featured silhouettes of people dancing with such energy against a vibrant, single color background. That energy and youth is what became associated with the product. Again, it wasn’t directly about the product, but the people. During that time in the industry, there were plenty of other manufacturers that were making similar products. Upon looking at the specs, some people would argue that those other mp3 players and portable digital music players were even better than the iPod because they were smaller, had more features, and worked on multiple platforms rather than just on Mac computers. But the iPods still won people over and continue to do so because Apple focused on something that the others did not – the emotional value.
Next, Apple is consistent about making experiences, especially with technical things, easy. They strive to make technology accessible to everybody. That’s part of their brand. A consumer using their products, walking into one of their retail stores or browsing their website can expect a similar experience. Fire up a Mac computer for the first time and you’ll see a short series of simple questions. Before you know it, set up is done. Walk into an Apple retail location and visit their Genius Bar, a place where experts are standing by to answer any product questions you may have. Online, there’s plenty of simple and easy-to-understand tutorials. They’ve embraced this goal, to make technology easy and accessible, and made it a driving force in everything they touch. When building a brand for yourself or your business, this point is essential. Make sure your employees, your partners and customers are clear on the guiding principles of your company. Make sure those principles permeate everything you do.
I hope this entry shed some light on the power of branding for you. Be sure to read over the comments provided to brandchannel.com from their brand survey. For the survey results and analysis, click here.
Until next time,
Steve
