Apple
Remember when it used to be cool to say you worked at Google? That was so yesterday. Apple is the place to work. Apple doesn’t sell out, trying to be all things to all people. Apple takes chances. They maintain their vision and don’t change because a competitor is making more money or has more market share. Apple takes care of its customers. It sees the future and creates cult brands as David Atkins might say.
With the daring introduction of the iPhone, on the heels of iTunes, Apple has really come into its own. Before the fact, old school brand planners might have said about these moves that moving away from its computer franchise was not smart for Apple. But Apple saw the future, it evolved – watching closely what people were putting on their iBooks. Then they moved into telephony. Positioning the iPhone as a phone was a huge strategic decision. (Everybody already knew what Apple did and stood for.) Wouldn’t you have liked to be in the marketing planning meeting, though, when management was deciding what to call the iPhone. “Jesus, it’s not a phone! It’s something completely knew. It’s a media integrator. It’s, it’s, it’s an iLife. No, an iVerything!”
Thanks to Steve Job’s incendiary vision, the Apple brand has transcended the products. Consumers trust Apple’s ingenuity and design. Mac sales this quarter are higher than ever before. That’s brand pull.
This is the type of brand pull Sony had not too long ago (before they got into the movie business.)