If you have any interest in what Apple does, then you’ve either read, heard, or participated in the uproar around the ad for the new M4 iPad Pro, an ad most succinctly described as “Apple crushes your beloved creative tools into a glass pancake.”
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I think the message was meant to be: “it all fits into an iPad! So flat! So small! So powerful! So worth the money!” But it falls flat (sorry), so much so that Apple has apologized for the ad.
It’s jarring not only because “we crush nice things” is empirically a bad thing to associate with a company, but because Apple’s entire brand is about creating products for smart, creative people with excellent taste.1
The company’s marketing tells a story—with remarkable consistency—about aesthetically-attuned people. We are not mainstream. We are special. We buy Apple products because we are sophisticated people, who use our computers to make cool things. In fact, the mere act of purchasing Apple products transforms us into people with good taste. Apple does not crush our favorite turntable, because Apple knows better than that. Right?
This is why the ad feels weird, in a way that it wouldn’t if the company weren’t this company. And it’s a great prompt to talk about what “brand” actually is: a narrative, composed by us, carried around in our heads.
The Mechanics of “Brand”
A brand is not a logo, it’s not a font, it’s not a website, it’s not even an advertisement. It’s what you think of when you think of a company or a product, and how you feel. It’s the story you tell about that brand, to yourself, in your own mind.
For instance, when I think “Apple,” and let my mind wander a bit, I visualize a spare, modern room with a simple, expensive desk, with a giant Apple monitor on it. There are big windows behind the desk. It’s California. I have a nice house with a yard. I can’t see my neighbors. I probably have an EV. I am taking the afternoon off from my job, to work on my own projects. I’m probably putting the finishing touches on my latest ambient techno album, or something.2 I don’t have any visible logos on my clothes. I’m wearing really good sneakers.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F6d991e5a-232e-445a-9f70-4f0e0766568c_3264x4896.jpeg)
If this sounds like a cliché, it is. It’s programmed into my brain, and a version of it is probably implanted in yours.
Brand advisor Marty Neumeier did a great deck on what exactly “brand” is, which I’ve referenced heavily in my own thinking since I found it, several years ago. You should go read it. He says, about brand:
It’s a person’s gut feeling, because brands are defined by individuals, not companies, markets, or publics.
It’s a gut feeling because people are emotional, intuitive beings.
In other words, it’s not what YOU say it is. It’s what THEY say it is.
He also talks about “charismatic brands,” of which Apple is one.
![A charismatic brand is any product, service, or organization for which people believe there's no substitute A charismatic brand is any product, service, or organization for which people believe there's no substitute](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ffeda080a-becd-42c0-9b06-0cc7bae90d5c_573x257.png)
If people believe that there is no substitute for a product, that means that the product has been differentiated from its competition (remember “think different?”). There is no competition! Nothing compares! Certainly not a PC.
The Dark Side of Brand Marketing
Companies can’t serve every person everywhere, because doing so would hurt their ability to serve anyone well. They would be spread too thin, financially, and wouldn’t find product-market fit. This is as true for knives as it is for computers, and as true for marketing as it is for automobile manufacturers. Companies do not want to spend more money than they absolutely have to. It’s most efficient to address a particular market really well, and to connect with consumers within that market who will reliably buy again and again.
Even a company that makes a product with broad use (soap) focuses on a particular market (women), because a strong appeal to a particular market means that people within that market are very likely to become repeat customers. Consumers see themselves in the ads, and like how the narrative surrounding the brand makes them feel. They reach for that particular soap (Dove), and ignore the other ones on the shelf.
This can go very wrong, of course.
An example that is less well-known than it should be: we as a culture in the United States typically think of “gamers” as young men or boys. Why? Because in the early 1990s, video game marketers decided that it would simply be too financially risky to market games to both boys and girls.
As Tracy Lien wrote in her excellent Polygon article “No Girls Allowed:”
In 1983, North America experienced a massive recession in the video game industry, now known as the video game crash. The crash had devastating effects, bankrupting game company after game company…The crash marked what many believed to be the end of the video game industry...The marketing of video games and consoles as toys was a way of saving the industry at retail. Once video games were back in toy stores, the industry had a chance at making money again.
"Knowing that you have limited funding, you can't just market shotgun. You can't just go after anybody," says Rodger Roeser [then-president of the Eisen Agency.]. "You need to have a very clearly differentiated and specific brand because that's going to play into where you're running your ads and what kind of ads you run. That niche-ing, that targeting makes it easier for marketers to have a very succinct conversation with their target without overspending and trying to reach everybody."
In the 1990s, the messaging of video game advertisements takes a different turn. Television commercials for the Game Boy feature only young boys and teenagers. The ad for the Game Boy Color has a boy zapping what appears to be a knight with a finger laser. Atari filmed a bizarre series of infomercials that shows a man how much his life will improve if he upgrades to the Jaguar console. With each "improvement," he has more and more attractive women fawning over him. There is nothing in any of the ads that indicate that the consoles and games are for anyone other than young men.
Per Lien, this “correction” resulted in the gaming industry straight-up ignoring girls for decades, which has cost the games industry many millions of dollars in potential revenue, and which has contributed in significant ways to sexism in the broader tech industry. In other words, a narrow marketing focus in a particular industry has changed our culture in insidious ways.
Bringing it back to Apple, maybe this minor stumble was an instance of the product strategy (“replace tools with one thing, an iPad!”) overtaking the marketing strategy (“make people feel absolutely great about buying this particular Apple product”). Or maybe it was something else. I don’t want to make too much of one ad. Anyway, Apple is fine. Nobody cares about stuff like this for more than a lightning-quick news cycle. It’s fascinating, though, when a little misstep suddenly throws the underpinnings of what “brand” actually is into sharp relief.
I am pretty sure that the inspiration for this ad was the “crushing stuff with a hydraulic press” thing from YouTube and elsewhere (I think it’s on TikTok?). Which is dad-level meme-trendy, I guess, but has nothing to do with Apple’s brand.
I am not personally releasing an ambient techno album. If you like that sort of thing, you might enjoy Snowbeasts, who are lovely people from Rhode Island.