Everyone wants to be an apple
There’s something Steve Jobs did that changed things. No, I am not speaking about adding the luxury factor for hardware or adding an aspirational status to devices.
He made people talk. About design, about art, about experiences. With everything he built, he made people aware of doing things in a different-yet-appealing way. The Internet is inundated with videos of him and his speeches, followed by gurus of all kinds preaching how he changed the marketing game, why he was a genius, so on and so forth.
His insistence on art and aesthetics, probably compelled a lot of people to look at the beauty in things, especially in the tech space. It inspired (and continues to) generations to take up design as a tech career. It compelled people to bring terms like UI/UX in everyday conversations, including the walkway meme.
And he set the bar high for simplicity. From ad films to website copy, everything apple does, people want to emulate. In fact, copywriting was usually something only ad agencies did. But apple changed that.
Today, a lot of brands, companies, and products are getting trapped in the apple maze. What I mean is in the bid to be an apple, perhaps originality is taking a hit. What apple did was astounding and their philosophy also took a lot of time to grow on people. But they stuck with what they believed in — standing out and creating an aura about themselves.
And possibly all of us marketers, brand people, and self-proclaimed evangelists (and other buzz words for regular work/person included) also somewhere struggle to tell clients, founders, and product people that it’s good to want to be an apple, but you’re possibly a watermelon, or a banana, or a grape. Why not focus on that? We’ll be a watermelon, but perhaps the best one out there, so much so that Harry Styles will write a song on us.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison because if everyone wants to be an apple, who’ll be an orange?
