To Begin at the Beginning.
I had just started my first job as a junior copywriter back in the late eighties, when we switched to computers – to Macintoshs from Apple, what else? After all, we were in advertising. And right from the beginning I loved my little grey friend whose smiling icon made me smile myself every morning. This love has lasted until today. I have never worked on anything else but a Mac.
There are a lot of myths about the company’s name. Some claim Steve Jobs liked apples so much he named his business after them. Others say, both Steves came up with the name because the case of their very first computer had been an apple box. And again others spread they just wanted to be in front of Atari in the telephone directory.
I myself have my own ideas about it for we all know the apple as the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge in paradise. Eating from it, Adam and Eve were supposed to experience their very personal development of awareness, emancipation, godlikeness.
And here we are, talking about the Mac. He, too, promised emancipation and independency to the people in the early eighties. Now, everybody could do to at home, what before was only granted to big businesses like IBM: taking in information and knowledge, processing, saving and communicating it. With a Mac everybody became the creator of his own personal universe.
This idea is also reflected in the logo, or why do you think the apple is bitten off? It is so because there is another deeper level of cognition besides the obvious denotation: the appeal to us all to nibble on this forbidden fruit of knowledge, to rebel against any kind of paternalism so that we can lead self-determined, conscious and creative lives.
You think this is a little far-fetched? Well, maybe. But it is my personal story about the most renowned and valued brand of the world. And because it is coherent in itself, it is valid und good enough for me.
For this is what branding is all about: great storytelling by stirring up associations and emotions which make a brand tangible, intelligible and loveable. But it is also about story sharing: the dialogic communication of the values and attitudes represented by a company or product. Because only by sharing these values and attitudes, do we feel being part of something bigger – something that transcends ourselves and adds sense and purpose to our lives.
And even if Apple has lost its great storyteller Steve and with him a lot of its charisma ever since, I will never forget how much I was impressed by Ridley Scott’s „1984“ commercial. My rebel heart jubilated: Finally a brand that understood me! Today I would add that it was damned brilliantly on strategy contributing a thousand percent to the brand’s values.
That is what killer branding is all about – for every business and every product.
Mark my words. Written on a Mac.