Brand Relevance: Making Competitors Irrelevant - always yours

8 BRAND RELEVANCE
new tools, a new vocabulary, and a graphical user interface. There
was a “ desktop ” with intuitive icons, a mouse that changed communication
with a computer, a toolbox, windows to keep track
of applications, a drawing program, a font manager, and on and
on. And it was in a distinctively designed cabinet under the
Apple brand. In the words of the Mac ’ s father, Steve Jobs, it was
“insanely great. ” 2 The 1984 ad in which a young women in bright
red shorts flings a sledgehammer into a screen where “ big brother ”
(representing of course IBM) spouts out an ideology of sameness
was one of the most notable ads of modern times. For the next
decade and more there were core Mac users, especially among
the creative community, who were passionately loyal to the Mac
and enjoyed visible, self - expressive benefi ts from buying and
using the brand. It took six years for Microsoft to come up with
anything comparable.
In 1997 Steve Jobs, returning from a forced twelve - year
exile from Apple, was the driving force behind the iMac ( “ i ”
initially represented “ Internet enabled ” but came to mean simply
“ Apple ” ). The iMac provided a new chapter to the Mac saga
and became a new — or at least a revised — subcategory. The best -
selling computer ever, its design and coloring were eye - catching.
Incorporating the then - novel use of the USB port, Apple made
the remarkable decision to omit a fl oppy disk. Instead of dooming
the product as many predicted, this made the product appear
advanced — made for an age in which people would share fi les
over the Internet instead of via disks.
Another computer revolution is under way. Products such
as smart phones and tablets like iPad are replacing laptop and
even desktop computers for many applications. The new winners
are fi rms such as Apple, Google with its Android software,
the communication fi rms AT & T and Verizon, server farms, and
application entrepreneurs. The losers will be the conventional
computer hardware and software businesses.
As in the case of Japanese beer, it was the emergence
of new subcategories such as solutions - focused mainframes,
minicomputers, workstations, servers, PCs, Macintosh, portables,