How Apple Becomes The “It” Brand
What Brand Marketers Can Learn From Apple’s Brooklyn Event This Week
On Tuesday, Apple unveiled its new iPad Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac Mini at a launch event hosted at the Brooklyn Music Academy in New York City. As per usual, the new products are thinner, faster, and pricier. There was no surprise “one more thing,” and the pre-event leaks about the new products turned out to be mostly accurate. Some had speculated updates or at least announcements about new AirPods and AirPower wireless charging mat, yet Apple stayed silent on those fronts. While that might have made a rather boring event for some, the keynote address that Apple delivered actually offer some interesting insights into not only its product strategy, but also how the trillion-dollar company positions and markets itself to the world.
Aligning Products With Creativity & Flexibility
Apple has a long-standing relationship with the creative community. Whereas a lot of PC and tablet makers tend to position their products as either mundane productivity tools or as portable gadgets for everyday use, Apple has always closely aligned its products with creative use cases such as photo and video editing, music recording and mixing, and animations. In addition, Apple has been positioning the camera as a creative tool by integrating photo and video editing tools and AR filters directly into the native camera app on iOS.
Therefore, it should come as no surprise that this alignment was a prominent theme throughout Tuesday’s keynote. With each new product unveiled, Apple followed up with on-stage demos and videos showcasing them as powerful creativity machines capable of fast graphics processing and media editing. One such highlight was Adobe’s demo of the Photoshop app on the new iPad Pro, which showed just how smooth the new tablet handled editing a PSD file with over a hundred layers. Then, taking things into another dimension, Adobe demonstrated how easy it is to export PSD files into its AR app Project Aero to create stunning 3D immersive content. Similarly, the rhetoric around the new Mac Mini also centered around its usefulness for creative tasks, a shift from its original positioning as a stepping stone for Windows switchers.
Of course, this alignment does not mean Apple is excluding mainstream users who have no need for Photoshop or Final Cut from its sales pitch. On the contrary, by touting its hardware products as premium devices capable of those heavy-duty computing tasks, Apple’s underlying message to mainstream users is clear — this is the best device in this category that you can buy. Apple is always quick to point out that each device may be designed for professional use, but they are made for everyone.
In a way, this alignment with creativity instead of productivity lends a halo of fun and ingenuity to its products and, by extension, its brand. As with Apple’s generally aspirational positioning, this creative alignment also works aspirationally — a non-professional user may buy an iPad Pro or Mac knowing that they will probably only edit a simple home video with it, but the idea that this Apple product could allow them to further explore their creative side is just as good as any incentive.
Beyond its hardware products, Apple is further aligning its brand with creativity by fostering ties with the creative communities around the world through the Today at Apple events hosted at its numerous retail locations. Billed as a “global platform for local talent,” this event series includes many educational sessions or performances hosted by local artists and creators to showcase their works and creative process, bringing the local creative communities to its various stores.
Retail As A Marketing Tool & Customer Education Platform
More than just sales channels, Apple Stores have long been the Cupertino company’s strongest marketing tool. Granted, the company has always featured its Genius Bar in-store customer service as an integral part of its retail operations, and that has not changed. But in recent years, especially since Apple hired ex-CEO of Burberry Angela Ahrendts as head of its retail operations, Apple Stores have been showing bigger ambitions in making its locations even more experience-driven rather than product-driven. It has designed new stores and renovated some existing ones (70 stores per year, per Ahrendts) as a town-square-style gathering space for customers, increasingly expanding their footprint into public gathering places including libraries, outdoor movie amphitheaters, and plazas. Although the “stores as town squares” positioning received some backlash, its retail mission remains largely unchanged.
On Tuesday, Apple devoted a standalone section to its retail operations, partly to underline its connection to the creative community as previously mentioned. It was clear that Apple was proud to show off its stores. Angela Ahrendts called retail Apple’s largest product, with its architecture as hardware and its in-store experience — led by Today at Apple — as software. Whereas the programming used to be more geared towards the professional creatives, offering lessons in video editing or coding, she was eager to point out some new sessions that are more geared towards regular consumers such as “photo walks” where customers can learn how to use the various camera effects on their iPhones to take the best pictures, or “sketch walks” that teach iPad users how to draw with Apple Pencil.
For Apple, leveraging its retail channels to offer customer education programs is both an effective sales tactic and a necessary service for boosting customer satisfaction with Apple products, which Tim Cook continued to obsess over for good reason. The more Apple can teach customers to use their products, the more entrenched they’ll become in Apple’s ecosystem.
In addition, such new programs in Today at Apple highlight just how important consumer technology has become in our day-to-day life. Gone are the days where you can simply buy a gadget and learn about how to use all its features by reading the user manual. Nowadays, our devices often come with an overwhelming amount of functions that many users may never learn to use. It is an issue that will only get worse as we step into the age of the smart home. The setup process alone is daunting enough that Best Buy has extended its Geek Squad service to offer customers free smart-home consultations and house calls for paid installations. Amazon has also quietly launched a similar home installment service as well.
Of course, the fundamental features should be intuitive and user-friendly by design, but our digital life is integrating with our physical world at such a high rate that mainstream users may understandably feel a little intimidated. This is not just an issue that is specific to a technology company like Apple, but one that all consumer-facing brands will need to address sooner or later. After all, there is hardly any industry that has yet to face some degree of digital disruption. For example, banks stand to benefit by educating customers about mobile banking apps and online investment services, while hotels can vastly improve the room service efficiency if the staff can briefly inform the guest at check-in about the mobile order functions on their apps or, as is the case with some hotels, via the smart speakers in their rooms. Of course, consumers aren’t usually coming to brands for a lecture on digital gadgets, so the positioning of such educational efforts should be an organic part of the customer service they offer when applicable.
Doubling Down On Security and Eco-Conscious Messages
Throughout the keynote, Apple repeatedly brought up its T2 security chip to emphasize how safe and secure its products are. This serves two purposes for Apple: one, it highlights Apple’s growing self-reliance on it’s industry-leading chipmaking capability, and two, it reiterates Apple’s stance on prioritizing the protection of user data and privacy. The first point is interesting in the context of Apple reportedly planning to replace processors from Intel with its own chips in Mac computers starting as early as 2020. (Tellingly, Intel barely got any mention during the keynote, even though all Macs launched today still uses Intel CPUs.) The second point is perhaps even more deliberate, considering the public dispute Apple is having with Bloomberg over a report claiming that Apple, along with some other U.S. tech companies, was using data servers with chips compromised by a Chinese manufacturer.
Besides privacy and security, Apple also made a strong point of how it is dedicated to its green manufacturing and eco-friendly initiatives. Both the new MacBook Air and Mac Mini are made of 100% recycled aluminum — partially from the scraps of the new iPad Pro. All products now use a higher percentage of recycled plastic as well. Moreover, all Apple Stores are now running on 100% renewable energy. Over and over, Apple is eager to drive home of the message that it takes its environmental responsibility seriously.
Granted, Apple has been quite vocal in protecting data privacy and being ever-more eco-conscious with its manufacturing. But to repeatedly emphasize these two parts of its corporate culture like it did on Tuesday is also an increasingly popular way for brands to appeal to a consumer base that is increasingly concerned with data security and environmental causes. At a time when nearly two thirds of consumers worldwide say they will buy or boycott a brand solely because of its position on a social or political issue, and 54% of U.S. teenagers think brands have a responsibility to minimize their environmental impact, it is more important than ever that brands take a stand on some of the prevailing social issues of the day, initiate or sponsor programs that contribute to those causes, and build affinity with today’s consumers.
The It Factor
Once again, Apple demonstrated with this product launch event why they are the “it” brand of the millennial generation. Above all, Apple is cool.
Apple is cool because they dared to “think differently” and usurped the dominant PC market with the iPhone. It is cool because of the crucial role it played in digitizing the way we consume music and the way they consistently incorporate music as part of their brand identity, with Lana Del Rey performing two songs to close out the event.
Apple is cool because of their elegant, trend-setting design language that partly stems from its close ties with the creative community, one that is spreading to not only other consumer gadget makers and startups, but also crossing over to many other industries, such as the new direct-to-consumer brands like Quip or Brandless.
Apple is cool because their alignment with creativity sets its products from mundane productivity tools. They are cool for caring about user privacy in an age when the likes of Google and Facebook seemingly can’t help but violate it. They are cool because they take concrete actions to minimize their environmental impact when environmental issues are becoming more pressing than ever.
In a word, Apple is cool because their branding is well aligned with the prevailing millennial values of being creative, experience-driven, and eco-conscious. And it is easy to sell $1,000+ smartphones and $800+ tablets when you are that cool.
