Big Technology
Apple Searches for an Identity
‘Our customers want to know who is Apple, and what is it that we stand for,’ Steve Jobs once said. Do we know today?
Apple doesn’t typically bungle its marketing, yet its recent ad about working from home was uncharacteristically bad. The spot showed a team working furiously from their living rooms, communicating exclusively via Apple software. They used FaceTime for video conferencing, iMessages for chat, and Apple’s calendar app for scheduling. The production value was great, but the message somewhat delusional.
Anyone who’s worked from home knows the world Apple imagined is a fantasy. We use Zoom and Hangouts for video, not FaceTime. We use Slack and Teams for chat, not iMessage. Using Apple’s communications software for work excludes people who don’t own Apple devices, so we stick to what functions on any platform. Apple knows this, yet it still ran an ad wishing it weren’t true.
More than a bad marketing decision, the ad points to a greater identity crisis taking place within the company. Marketing inside Apple has always been about defining what it is at its core. “It’s a very noisy world, and we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us,” Steve Jobs said before releasing Apple’s…
