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| The computer for the rest of us
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| The image of Apple computer, as a successful business has dimmed and brightened several times in the last 30 years. But it identity (conveyed by its name and multicolored bitten-off-apple logo) as an innovative and pathbreaking firm has survived almost intact during the same period.
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| Apple as a gilded, do-no-wrong innovator is no longer what it once was.
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| It’s great having the whole internet in your pocket, but the question now is, will consumers be able to look beyond the subhuman working and living conditions of sweatshop workers who make parts for Apple.
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| The computer for the rest of us
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| In the early decades, Apple’s brand was very much that of a challenger, bringing easy to use computers to consumers and small businesses in a way that as focused on the needs, individuality, and style of ordinary people, rather than the conformity and technical mandates of big business. Apple’s brand position has evolved, but today’s brand is still consistent with these early promises.
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| The company renamed itself Apple Inc. rather than Apple Computer. At the time, this was a significant move, signifying Apple’s move beyond being more than a computer company.
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| Apple has a branding strategy that focuses on the emotions. The starting point is how an Apple product experience makes you feel. The Apple brand personality is about lifestyle; imagination; liberty regained; innovation; passion; hopes, dreams and aspirations; and power-to-the-people through technology.
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| The Apple brand personality is also about simplicity and the removal of complexity from people’s lives; people-driven product design; and about being a really humanistic company with a heartfelt connection with its customers.
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| The Apple brand is not just intimate with its customers, it’s loved, and there is a real sense of community among users of its main product lines.
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| Siri highlights the marketing genius of Apple: speech control and interactivity are not new features on computers or phones. For example, smartphones running Microsoft’s Windows Mobile operating system have had very similar functionality to Siri for some time. When Apple created the Siri “personal assistant” which gives these otherwise rather hard to describe features a character, consumers were given a hook around which they could finally understand what voice interactivity was all about.
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| By keeping consumers at the center of everything it does, Apple is able to anticipate what they want next and break new ground in terms of both design and performance.
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| Apple is about imagination, design and innovation
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| emotional brands have three things in common: * The company projects a humanistic corporate culture and a strong corporate ethic, characterized by volunteerism, support of good causes or involvement in the community. Nike blundered here. Apple, on the other hand, comes across as profoundly humanist. Its founding ethos was power to the people through technology, and it remains committed to computers in education.
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| The human touch is also expressed in product design, Gobe said. Apple’s flat-screen iMac, for example, was marketed as though it were created personally by Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive, not by factory workers in Asia. “People are anxious and confused,” Gobe said. “Technology is accelerating faster and faster than we can keep up with. People need to find some grounding, that human touch, the leading hand. There’s a need to recreate tribes that give people a grounding.”
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| Writer Naomi Klein is a leading critic of branding, especially Apple’s. Klein, author of No Logo, argues that companies like Apple are no longer selling products. They are selling brands, which evoke a subtle mix of people’s hopes, dreams and aspirations.
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| Apple used great leaders — Cesar Chavez, Gandhi and the Dalai Lama — to persuade people that a Macintosh might also allow them to “Think Different.”
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| Ryan Bigge, writing in Adbusters, said: “Our dreams and desires for a better world are no longer articulated by JFKs nor generated through personal epiphanies — they are now the intellectual currency of Pepsi and Diesel. We used to have movements for change — now we have products. Brands may befriend us, console us and inspire us, but the relationship comes at the highest price imaginable — the loss of self.
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| The “1984” ad began a branding campaign that portrayed Apple as a symbol of counterculture — rebellious, free-thinking and creative. According to Charles Pillar, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, this image is a calculated marketing ploy to sell expensive computers.
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| “I’m not making this up. Members of the Mac’s original engineering and marketing team told me all about it. They did it by building a sense of belonging to an elite club by portraying the Mac as embodying the values of righteous outsiderism and rebellion against injustice. It started in the early ‘80s with the famous ‘1984’ TV commercial that launched the Mac, and continued with ‘The computer for the rest of us’ slogan and several ad campaigns playing on a revolutionary theme.”
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| Single Word Associations with Apple
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