I found this very nice (legible "sunday reading") and informative article about Apple on Weendavisens (Weekend newspaper) website. The article deal with Apple as a brand and how loyal mac users are. Last year I followed a course on Copenhagen Business School called "Symbolic Consumption And Identity" where I wrote an assignment about Apple and "Symbolic Consumption And Identity" . And this is, among other, what this article is about.
The article is actually written in danish, but I translated it into english using Google's translate service, which explain some of the translation is in "danish". If you want to read it in danish you can find it here (pdf)
Enjoy
Søren
By Nicholas M. Lassen Friday, October 3, 2008
Branded. Apple has since the turn of the millennium transformed itself from being a small exclusive computer company to become a powerful media giant. But you can also become too popular?
WHO will provide around 5,000 danish kr. for a mobile phone? Even a phone which most likely is technically obsolete in a couple of years in which stones probably have a model, which costs half and could double that?
It is obvious many will, for Apple's extremely expensive mobile phone sells like hot cakes.Apple says the company - and the iPod, iMac, iPhone, iTunes and MacBook provides the most popular products. From a small computer company, which made expensive home computers with special emphasis on ease of use (and practically only used by professionals in the field of graphics and design), the company has since millennium transformed into a veritable giant in the entertainment industry.
Apple Inc. is now the largest retailer of music in the huge North American market, and in portable players for music and film company is totally dominant.
Ironically, Apple has always cultivated an image as the cheeky little brother. The bearded alternative. "Think different "was the slogan for many years. And unlike any other high-tech product providers have Apple's advertising always played on the (user) friendly, helpful and transparency, that is soft in a traditional 'hard' and cool, the hardware world. Since the mid-1980s built up a dedicated user around the globe who cultivated the company and its products as a religion. The term cult of Mac on the phenomenon is not plucked out of thin air (and there are also both a popular book and blog of same name).
Apple has launched himself as an intelligent counter cultures within the computer industry, and loyalty from customers has been extreme. The company has even played merrily with the song about that little Apple were smarter and smarter than large heavy IBM and Microsoft. A song Apple catamite with a will now in the third decade of his latest film, which shows two persons, representing a traditional Windows PC (overweight with greasy hair, suit and tie, easier choleric and without something wise to say) and a Mac (young, casual, clever, smart, during the game), who airily explains how simple it is to be a Mac. Magazines with names such as MacAddict and Macworld also tells you little about the devotion of fans to Apple products.
When the company's director and co-founder Steve Jobs is on stage for the annual launch of new products, it looks like most of all an awakening meeting. Without visible script presents the contentious and wayward billionaire (always in the same clothes: jeans and relaxed sleeved T-shirt without logo), his company's latest technological marvels, as was the actual world, it was about. With carefully edited slide shows and built rhetorical perfect claps, he examines the product portfolio, so the slightest news launched (updates of programs known example) and new products at the end. For wild scream and over flowing ovation in the House of course. The show sent course live on the web and technology sites commenting on the forecast alive again, as one hundred thousands of nerds across the globe can follow simultaneously. The fact that there are several hundred of its employees present to clap down to the spectator rows are another matter.
BUT how Apple was such a popular brand? That's because just two things: excellent products and eminent marketing. Mac introduced for example mouse for the home computer and simultaneously throughout the graphical user with an imitation of an old-fashioned desk, then suddenly people could understand what it basically incomprehensible machine could do for them. Apple was also extremely quick to understand the value of article of every day use emotional and functional attracting consumers.
The industrial designer, business strategist and author Alexander Manu invented in the mid-90erne term ToolToys on emotionally appealing design, that is, objects designed with a built element of play and joy. And his crown case was just the Apple Macintosh computer's graphical user interface. He wrote in his book The Big Idea of Design (1999): "Before coming to the Mac, 'deleted' we files in a vacuum, a room, we saw only (if at all) in the tiny circuits inside the computer. We got no response to what we did, no confirmation that we actually relax with the documents we no longer needed. The designers who have created the Mac interface, acknowledged that people are in the habit of, which is dependent on confirmation through sound and pictures. They gave us a place where we could put our 'waste' means a dustbin. And what is more: a coffin, which bulges out when you throw things in it, and thus provides further confirmation that the job is being resolved. " Subsequently, all the groundbreaking ideas from Apple Macintosh copied (and some of them developed) by Microsoft in Win-Windows OS, but Apple still has a totally unique quality reputation in the consumer electronics world.
Apple was otherwise in deep crisis for just a decade ago. Firebrands and co-founder Steve Jobs had left the company in 1985 after disagreements with the board. After he had helped to revolutionize the computer market during 70erne and 80erne, revolutionized he now animation movie in 90erne with its own film studios Pixar, which issued the first long feature film 'cartoons' solely generated by computer graphics. The film came out in 1995 and called Toy Story, Pixar has since released a blockbuster year, and animation has never been the same since. Disney group bought Pixar in 2006 for 7.4 billion U.S. dollars and made Jobs the board of Disney, where he could take place as the largest private shareholder.
In 1997, facing the successful Jobs then returned to the troubled Apple as director, where he was received as the returning son. He immediately launched a thorough cleanup of the company, whose shares had fallen sharply for several years, and could simultaneously reveal that Microsoft would develop a new Office suite for Mac and also to invest 150 million U.S. dollars of shares without obtaining voting rights as a shareholder. A bit of a capital injection.
In 1998 came the iMac, even a groundbreaking piece of electronics that whole computer in one handy box to the desktop (like the first Macintosh). It sold 800,000 pieces in a few months, turned Apple's accounts from deficit to surplus for the first time since 1993. The really big breakthrough for Apple came in 2001. It launched the new operating system Mac OS X, which was part of Unix and open source-based - and thus both stable for users and relatively simple to work with the professional developers. A product is really different from the direct competitor, Microsoft's Windows operating system. And then came the same year gadgets that would transform the entertainment industry and the economy around it, namely the iPod.
In his book The Perfect Thing describes Newsweek journalist Steven Levy how this little white thing with the easily recognizable white headphones to was an icon and, like Sony's Walkman a few decades earlier totally changed music buyers' habits and buying patterns. Apple launched, too soon an online music shop, which made it easy to go on the Internet and download music (and later film and TV series) - and even cheap, because it suddenly left off of having to spend money on the expensive logistics of the production, transport and storage of records, CDs or DVDs. And the iPod was not only bound to Mac computers, but could soon also be used with Windows PCs, which was to to conquer new territory for Apple.
Apple's iPod was a few years, virtually synonymous with portable music experience with the launch last year of a combined iPod and cell phone, the violently hyped iPhone, the company's success reached new heights. Despite a soaring price iPhone will be torn away across the globe, where it is for sale, and since Apple in July of this year opened a branch on their website with the sale of additional small applications to the phone, then they sold for 60 million U.S. dollars just on the first month and brought one million dollars a day in revenue alone on the small side business. In Denmark, people stood in queues to streets in Copenhagen several days before the iPhone came up for sale, despite a crazy price and a half years of fixation for a certain telecommunications company.
In March this year appointed the U.S. business magazine Fortune Magazine Although Apple the most admired company in America, but success does not come without problems. Over the past few years raised a massive criticism of Apple and its business practices, both from consumers and people in the industry. The leading technology magazine Wired could so earlier this year put a big dramatic deferred front of the famous apple logo in sombre black and gray wrapped with razor-wire under the heading Evil Genius - and a large ambivalent Articles about the company's tough business model and operation. (Please note the same sheet as ten years earlier had almost saints diced Apple with a cover letter with the 'right' apple logo and the box Pray. At the time, acted article on why and how it might save this love, but ailing firm.)
While the environmental organizations spot on the company's very little green profile, as even within the gaseous consumer electronic business is in the worst end. Apple's pricing was also subjected to massive criticism, the first version of the iPhone, for example, fell 200 U.S. dollars in price after only two months after its launch - too bad for Apple's most loyal fans and early adapters! Journalists and certain Internet media, which had revealed upcoming Apple products, was pressured to reveal their sources, and several of the popular products technical quibbles also came under fire - including the fact that it almost impossible for consumers to replace the battery in the portable products. Pricing of music in your iTunes online store may be in contradiction with EU rules because it fails to pay the same in each country, and Denmark won Forbrugerstyrelsen a case for compensation to consumers for a number of congenital defects in a number of laptops, Apple initially had refused to take responsibility for.
Allegations of monopolistic conditions and general kanøfling of other players on the market have become more frequent, and most recently a U.S. company that makes cheap computers that can run Apple's programs, brought against the company, because Apple will not accept that the other makes machines , Which can run their software. Apple's proprietary ecosystem is hardly the most flexible and beneficial to consumers, so perhaps the issue is whether Apple has actually gone up and been a little too popular? So popular and widespread that the profit hunt has lost its original basis and is putting its goodwill and its entire image at risk. IT journalist and technical manager of the company Meeho! Limited, Anders Østergaard Jensen, said that Apple's problems in the past tells something more about the company's success, than on actual changes at Apple:
"Allegations of monopolistic behavior and abuse of market dominance is not a crisis characters. It is rather a kind impact of Apple's success. Microsoft and Google have long been similar cases ride because of their size and success, which is so massive that no competitor can match. The criticism of Apple is not new, but until now the company has become so large , it means something, because there really is money at stake. "
Østergaard Jensen notes that he is not the rabid Mac user, but using both Mac and PC on a daily basis. However he believes that Apple with its Mac OS X operating system made a genius strategy by making it simple and easy to go to for professional users and IT developers. In private, quite ordinary computer users think they also know that Apple has a future:
"The advertisements not lying, Mac is still easier to go for than Windows. Have we also iPod or iPhone, so it all works together without the slightest problem, and it is the case, it should be.According to Apple a few years ago went over to Intel processors (innards like PCs have, ed.) So that you can install and run Windows on top of its Mac interface on all Apple computers.It is really smart, the reverse is unbelievable. "
And if the dry numbers tell the truth, then Anders Østergaard Jensen right: Apple has started to eat the greedy into the otherwise totally Windows-dominated PC-computer market in the United States, and the shares reached new heights last month, a short transition, the company even more worth on the stock market than the much much bigger Google. Google, whose internal business motto, in fact, 'Do not be evil "and whose director is also a director of Apple, with among others Al Gore. 'Get a Mac' says Apple's latest slogan. Many are still following the call. And on the Web, Apple has now reached five billion music tracks were sold since the opening of their music in 2003.The rest of the entertainment industry can only gape at Apple and is now trying to reinvent the response in the form of new common technical standards and subscription-based download services. So while taking criticism for Steve Jobs is laughing all the way to the bank.
Alexander Manu: ToolToys and The Big Idea of Design, DDC, 1999 and 1998
Steven Levy: The Perfect Thing. Simon and Schuster, 1996 © Wired Magazine, # 04, 2008
Henrik Vejlgaard: Anatomy of a Trend, McGrawHill, 2008.
