A brand attribute becomes history
How Apple lost bragging rights to plug and play
Ever seen a billion dollar brand asset vanish into the blue? I saw it happen after I joined Apple as a packaging writer. Never mind when this was. OK, it was 1993. This was back when software came in cardboard boxes.
I’d been a copywriter at J. Walter Thompson, Foote Cone & Belding and Bowes Dentsu (Young & Rubicam). I was freelancing on the Nissan account at Chiat/Day when I drove up to Cupertino to interview at Apple. It was April, a beautiful time of year.
Apple was my first corporate gig. Cupertino was not like Southern California. I missed living and working in places like West LA, Brentwood, Santa Monica and Old Pasadena. I missed taking the California Incline to the Pacific Coast Highway and heading north to Malibu. I missed wandering around the Venice Beach Boardwalk on my lunch hour, seeing Harry Perry roll by on his blades.
The South Bay had its compensations. Like some bucolic country, for one thing. There really was a Stevens Creek near the west end of Stevens Creek Boulevard. Instead of turning right on Foothill Boulevard and heading north to Palo Alto, you turned left and took Stevens Canyon Boulevard south through vineyards and open space preserves.
You could still drive through orchards. C.J. Olson’s Cherries straddled Mathilda Avenue south of El Camino Real in Sunnyvale. Peach orchards bottlenecked Los Gatos Boulevard where it turned into Bascom Avenue. Blossom Hill Road turned pink and white with blossoms in the spring. And you could have ham and eggs at the Good Earth Restaurant, wondering where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak sat when they talked about the startup they’d named Apple.
Creative Services was housed at 10455 Bandley Drive. Bandley 2 they called it. Steve Jobs was still at NeXT, up in Mountain View. Jobs had been ousted from the company he’d co-founded. But his spirit still lingered. Some of the people I worked with had worked with him.
The great creative directors had left Apple by then, but we still had some smart people in Creative Services. It was a full-service in-house agency with designers, art directors, writers and print buyers. Our receptionist was doing postgraduate work in physics. She was a contractor named Chandra (I think her parents were hippies).
Idyllic, right?
It was too good to last. Soon after I joined Apple, the company had a bad quarter. Wall Street screamed for blood.
This was a time of mergers and acquisitions, you understand. It was a mania that started in the 1980s, when Fortune magazine — representing the view of Wall Street — wrote fawning articles about CEOs who downsized America’s iconic companies. Corporate raiders would buy these companies and then go on cost-cutting binges to “squeeze out the waste.”
Business writers made destruction sound like a wonderful thing. They wrote glowingly of buccaneering chief executive oafs who lopped budgets, shed the fat and slashed overhead.
Wall Street mouthpieces at Fortune cheered on the corporate raiders, making it socially acceptable to destroy lives and careers. The cheering stopped once they’d cheered themselves out of jobs, but by then the damage was done. We had conflated capitalism with Darwinism, infusing it for good measure with the toxic gospel of Ayn Rand.
Anyway, bowing to pressure from Wall Street, Apple laid off 2500 of its 14500 employees. That was on July 15, 1993.
Apple called it a reorg. We’d known it was coming a month before it happened. It was an elegiac time, like one long funeral wake. People cracked ghoulish jokes, brought sugar cookies to work, made mint juleps. Then on the fateful day management downsized Creative Services. We went from fifty-seven to seventeen people. I didn’t expect to make the cut but I did, becoming one of the seventeen survivors.
Some other departments fared worse. We heard that a despondent programmer killed himself. We never learned who he was, how he did it or where he did it. Who knows, maybe it was just a rumor.
They renamed our department, calling it Corporate Identity and Design. We moved from our cinderblock building on Bandley Drive to the fourth floor of a cheerless corporate tower on De Anza Boulevard. And I kept writing packaging copy.
When I joined Creative Services, I’d use the phrase “plug and play” or “plug-and-play ease of use” in just about every piece of copy I wrote for Macintosh hardware and peripherals.
Plug and play represented a brand attribute I’d always associated with Apple. It was part of the brand’s appeal.
One of Apple’s editors had kept cutting the words plug and play out of my copy. One day, galled by my persistence, she underlined plug and play three times in red ink, and wrote the admonitory words “pet peeve,” followed by three furious exclamation points in the margin.
As it happened, that day’s issue of Information Week (June 6, 1994) had a story on Microsoft’s big push to co-opt one of Apple’s biggest brand attributes — you guessed it, plug and play.
They even had a picture of a Microsoft banner that had the tagline Plug and Play with a registration mark jauntily placed at the end of it. I showed the article to Hugh Dubberly, then manager of what was left of our department.
Hugh alerted Apple Legal. I got a call from Jill Sarnoff, our senior trademark counsel. Jill wanted samples of printed material showing instances of Apple using the phrase plug and play anytime in the previous seven years.
Hugh and I looked at the samples of brochures and ads we had lying around the department. We couldn’t find a single instance of Apple using those words in its corporate marketing in the previous seven years.
The phrase plug and play had been expunged from Apple’s corporate communications by a persnickety editor who thought it sounded trite (of course it did, but customers had eaten it up).
Apple Legal ended up sending Microsoft a cease-and-desist letter, and Microsoft let it go. But we never established our rights to the plug-and-play brand attribute.
Apple has shared ownership of it with the rest of the computer industry since then. Intel and the other members of the USB consortium trademarked plug and play in 1996 or thereabouts, without a peep of protest from Apple. How much was that brand attribute worth? You tell me.
Great writers like Penny Kapousouz, Laurie Brandalise, Steve Rabosky, Ken Segall, Steve Hayden and Chris Wall at Chiat/Day and BBDO helped build the Apple brand. The bond their words created with customers was one of Apple’s most valuable assets. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, he made sure people understood that.
