Apple

One would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't agree that Apple is one of the greatest brands of our time. The vastness of its impact. The industries it has changed. The products it has created. The behaviours it has influenced. The extraordinary number of ways in which its design language, thinking and philosophy have found their way into our everyday lives.

Apple has been alongside me for most of my professional life.

Before Apple became the ubiquitous consumer brand we know today, it was something rather different. It was a creative tool.

Let me wind the clock back.

Like many things, there was a time when advertising agencies were very different places from those you would find today. The creative department was configured as a collection of little offices, each occupied by a copywriter and an art director. Beyond them was the studio, a pit of finished artists, calligraphers, illustrators and other technical and creative experts. Boards, paper, tracing paper, photographs, Letraset and illustrations were painstakingly assembled in the studio before the finished work was passed to a production house to be transformed into something that could actually be printed. It was a complicated, highly skilled and almost entirely manual process.

And then a little Apple Macintosh turned up.

It didn't arrive with a fanfare announcing that it was about to dismantle an entire way of working. At first, it quietly integrated itself into the creative department, taking the first steps in the digitisation of the creative industry. Today, when I see concepts being developed to almost finished-art quality on screen, before being transmitted across the world in seconds, I sometimes think back to those agency studios and all the people and processes that once existed between an idea and its execution.

Apple had a lot to do with changing that.

For years, we kept an original Macintosh 128K at Grapplegroup Cape, the business that became the first Group GPL office. It was affectionately known as "Doorstop" because, frankly, with its then-obsolete technology, that was about the only practical purpose it served.

One day, for no particular reason, I turned it on.

Hey presto.

The little screen illuminated and there was the cursor, sitting patiently in the top left-hand corner, waiting for a command.

It still worked.

For quite a long time, Apple felt like it belonged to the creative industry.

Macs were the machines used by designers, art directors and creative studios. There was something almost cult-like about the relationship.
PCs were computers. Macs were creative tools. And Apple understood this relationship extraordinarily well.

Perhaps nothing captured it better than the multi-award-winning 1997 Apple 'Think Different' campaign, developed by TBWA\Chiat\Day.
The campaign celebrated people who had challenged convention and changed the world: Einstein, Gandhi, Picasso and others.
It said remarkably little about computers and an enormous amount about the people Apple wanted to have a relationship with.

And then something profound happened.

Apple escaped the studio.

The company that had established such an extraordinary relationship with the creative professions took that same philosophy into everyday life. Steve Jobs famously introduced the iPod around a wonderfully simple idea: 1,000 songs in your pocket. Think for a moment about what sat behind those five words. Computing, digital storage, software, music licensing, miniaturisation, industrial design. An entirely new way of buying, carrying and listening to music.

Enormous complexity reduced to a human proposition anyone could understand.

Then the specialist computer company beloved by the creative professions found itself producing one of the most widely used and culturally significant devices of our technological revolution, the iPhone.

Perhaps that extraordinary expansion tells us something fundamental about Apple.

It didn't abandon the philosophy that had made creative people love it; rather, it democratised that thinking.

I often wonder what held it all together: was it a matter of timing, the founder, the products themselves, the advertising, the stores, the packaging?

Anyone who has bought an Apple product will recognise the peculiar moment when you are confronted with that beautifully constructed, smooth, satin-like box and find yourself wondering whether it is actually acceptable to throw it away.

Then there are the Apple Stores. Whether I am passing the store on Passeig de Gràcia in Barcelona or Fifth Avenue in New York, I remain amazed by how full of people they invariably are. They don't look like conventional shops. They are open, light and inviting, with products on tables, effectively asking to be touched.

Which brings me to what I think may be the extraordinary consistency behind Apple.

Apple makes friends with people.

From its wonderfully simple name and icon to its open-faced product interfaces, inspiring advertising, inviting stores and unmistakable packaging, Apple has spent decades making extraordinarily complicated technology feel understandable, approachable and friendly.

The technology inside an iPhone is anything but simple. Neither is the global infrastructure required to make everything around it work. But my relationship with it is. Touch it, swipe it, listen to it, take a photograph, send something. Apple didn't make the technological revolution simple. It made our relationship with it feel simple.

I don't know how many design meetings I have attended where a client, designer or creative director has said something along the lines of:
"Can we make it a little more Apple-esque?"

Everybody in the room immediately understands what they mean. They are asking us to remove things, to keep it simple, to make something complicated feel effortless. Apple has established such a powerful and recognisable design philosophy that countless other brands now use it as a reference point for their own ambitions.

And perhaps this brings me back to why Apple is such a challenging brand to write about.

There is too much. The Macintosh, iMac, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch, App Store, the stores, the packaging. All parts of an ecosystem woven into everyday life.

But trying to explain Apple through any one of these things rather misses the point.

The remarkable achievement is that they all somehow feel like Apple.

I have spent my professional life witnessing technology transform the creative industry almost beyond recognition, and Apple has been there for the vast majority of that journey.

For me, that little Macintosh 128K appeared in the corner of an advertising studio. Years later, it sat on the floor of Grapplegroup Cape, affectionately known as Doorstop.

Today, I carry its descendants around with me.

One in my pocket, one in my bag and another in my ears.

And perhaps that is the best way I can explain Apple's place in my view of the best brands ever.

It began by making friends with the creative industry.

Then, it made friends with the world.

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