The A to Z of distinctive brands: Apple.

A new series looking at what the best brands do to stand out from the crowd.

Paul Worthington

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You instantly know it’s Apple. Whether you love it or loathe it, you know it. Whether you’re twenty yards from a store in a mall, a hundred yards from a billboard on the street, or two feet from the phone in someone’s hand.

This is known as distinctiveness. It refers to how well a brand stands out from other brands in the complex landscape of our everyday lives. It’s important because empirical research shows that the more distinctive a brand is, the better it tends to perform.

So what makes Apple so distinctive? The typical narrative around Apple tends to center on simplicity, minimalism and elegance. And while these things are all true and very consistent, they are far from what makes the brand distinctive. In fact, misinterpreting the Apple brand is a big reason why copying their simplicity and minimalism has only delivered a fraction of their success to others.

What truly makes the Apple brand distinctive is neither minimalism nor simplicity, but unique and highly recognizable visual cues in their products, which then feature heavily in their advertising, and tend to represent the opposite of what everyone else is doing. Apple literally zigs while the world zags, and they’ve done it consistently for over twenty years.

Let’s start with the first generation iMac from 1998:

This was the first major new product release upon the return of Steve Jobs to the company. What made this so distinctive were the colors, which flew in the face of the black and beige boxes of the computer industry of the time. The iMac didn’t do anything differently compared to any other computer, it just looked different. And that was enough.

With the launch of iPod, Apple reused the color lesson by creating a white product to stand out in a world of black devices. For a while every time you saw a white earphone cable you knew the person was listening to an iPod, which was deliberately reinforced in their advertising:

When iPhone launched, it was the only smartphone that didn’t have keyboard. So the distinctive visual elements became screen and home button:

It was because of the importance of the screen, and thus the icons on the screen, in making Apple distinctive, that they subsequently sued Samsung for patent infringement when they copied.

Nevertheless, as iPhone evolved it became broadly copied and screen and home button became commoditized. So Apple used the advent of facial recognition to introduce another new and distinctive visual asset, the notch:

There’s no functional reason for the notch to exist the way it does, but as this ad demonstrates, it’s unique and distinctive to Apple. Exactly like white iPod earphones before it.

With photography a primary use of a smartphone, the “camera hump” on the back of the iPhone 11 Pro is now as distinctive as the notch on the front. It doesn’t have to look this way, and if minimalism were the goal it would blend in rather than stand out. But blending in isn’t the goal and standing out is. Whether you like the aesthetic or not, it screams of distinctiveness. If someone points an iPhone 11 Pro at you, it can’t be any other phone but the new iPhone. And if that sounds familiar, it’s because they’ve been doing it consistently for over twenty years:

As soon as you know the formula you’ll find these distinctive visual cues all over the brand. The oblong rather than circular shape of the Apple Watch, the way they use red on the crown. The extremely difficult to mill, and thus copy, aluminum enclosures of their Macs. The white Airpods that dangle just enough to make it obvious what you’re wearing. All of which are then reinforced over and over again in their advertising and every-time you see someone using one of their products.

It’s these carefully planned and precisely placed visual cues that are the real secret to Apple’s distinctiveness. It isn’t minimalism and simplicity that makes Apple, Apple. It’s their masterful deployment of minimalism to emphasize these distinctive points of visual difference.

Published By

Paul Worthington is a branding professional who has worked with with some of the worlds best brands. He is president of brand innovation consultancy, Invencion, and publishes Off Kilter, a weekly contrarians guide to the business of brand, marketing and design delivered to your inbox weekly.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.

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Paul Worthington

Strategic advisor. Brand specialist. Scottish exile. Husband, father, bad photographer. President at Invencion: http://www.invencion.com