Branding and Brand Management: Apple
April 30th, 2010 — 0 Comments — Permalink
* apple
* brand
* brand-management
* logo
* history
Note: This is an essay I wrote for a branding assignment a few weeks back. To summarise Apple's brand in only 1500 words was quite a hard thing to do, but I do feel it is an accurate reflection of the company and covers the main points in the company history. The original PDF can be downloaded here.
Apple may seem like an easy target for a branding exercise – recent successes have seen their market share in mobile devices explode1 and their brand become one of the most widely recognised in the world – but it was not so long ago that the Apple brand faced extinction, along with the company itself and opinions vary over what it is that really makes Apple the global technology powerhouse we see today.
Humble beginnings
Apple started out on April Fools’ Day 1976 like many tech companies – in a Silicon Valley garage. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were young, naïve 20-somethings who set out to bring the personal computer to the masses.
Starting with the Apple I, and later the legendary Apple II and Macintosh computers, the two Steve’s built one of the fastest growing companies in the world and carved out a reputation for being design innovators. In the words of Mr Jobs, design at Apple “is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works”. This is one of the cornerstones of Apple’s brand – to create products of the highest quality that are easy to use.
Throughout the 80’s Apple steadily gained market share amongst business, education and enthusiast markets, helped by their introduction of the Laserwriter – one of the first consumer laser printers – and popular desktop publishing software. It was during this period that Pepsi President John Scully was appointed as CEO and it was he who transformed Apple “into the biggest single computer company in the world [...] boosting the advertising budget...