“Before Steve Jobs got his hands on Apple for the second time in 1997, things were far simpler,” Jonathan Salem Baskin writes for Entrepreneur. “Serious business customers were different from their playful consumer counterparts. Men bought technology products; women were fashion buyers. Kids had disposable income to waste, and mature folks cautiously invested their pennies. Branding promises were made solely in beautiful advertising, price was pretty much all that mattered at retail, and customer usage and satisfaction were afterthoughts.”
“Oh, what a difference an iMac makes,” Baskin writes. “Jobs was a magician, capable of casting a ‘reality distortion field’ on anyone in his presence… by inventing a new reality, he ruined branding as we knew it.”
“Apple blew up the rules of branding because Jobs simply didn’t recognize them. He didn’t follow the approved checklist, and he never did what he was supposed to do. He knew that someone else’s success wouldn’t be his own, not because of his ego, but because it’s a fact that imitating others has never resulted in great successes,” Baskin writes. “He left it to Apple’s competitors to produce lame, unsold computers with colorful lids, knockoff ads that inadvertently made Apple look better and a world of smartphones and tablets that look like iPhones and iPads.”
Read more in the full article here.