A large part of our in-class discussions have focused on Apple. Although my artsy family and I were already "Mac people" in addition to the countless "creative" and "alternative" free-willed Apple users of suburban America, I couldn't help but think that a large part of Apple's success has been its strategic positioning as a desirable "status product. As we have discussed in class, this was deftly accomplished by artistic brand management by Jobs and his underlings.
The point of this post is hopefully a brief and self-referential one; the most effective (i.e. "pithy" in college-lingo) messages are the ones that are delivered in a manner consistent with their content. I think that a large part of Apple's success has been due to its self-definition as a non-PC (i.e. non-IBM) product. This was exemplified in the interview we watched in class (where Jobs grilled a suit-and-tie nine-to-fiver who was applying for a position at Apple and was more recently addressed with the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" series of short commercials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5z0Ia5jDt4
I'm sure that the aesthetically-pleasing graphical interfaces and soothing variety of fonts initially positioned the Mac as a piece of art in an otherwise-bleak technological creative wasteland, but I think that deliberate and almost surgically-precise brand management is a large part of the reason that I am typing this on a Mac.
Good messages are short and to the point. Sometimes they even have abrupt endings (although rarely).
No comments:
Post a Comment