Apple allow its customers to feel as if they're a sort of spiritual-historical elite on a mission

[snagglepuss]

Apple allow its customers to feel as if they are personally making history—that they are a sort of spiritual-historical elite, even if there are many millions of them. The purchaser of an Apple product has been made to feel like he is taking part in a world-historical mission..

snip

Those who attack Apple as a quasireligion are more correct than they know: the company does function on the assumption that its designers, and Steve Jobs above all, are qualitatively different from the rest of us. The cult of the designer is the foundation of Apple’s secular religion. And there is a way for the rest of us to participate in the truth upon which the design is based, and to rise to the human level of the designers themselves: it is to buy an iPhone or an iPod. This is how Jobs explained the superiority of the iPod over other MP3 players: “We won because we personally love music. We made the iPod for ourselves.” Nothing ambiguous about that. Apple products are built by gods for gods. And in a free market, this privilege is available to anyone with the understanding and the money to acquire it.


No wonder that the counterculture fizzled in the early 1980s: everyone was promised they could change the world by buying a Macintosh. Linking Apple to the historical process (Hegel comes to Palo Alto!), and convincing the marketplace that the company always represented the good side in any conflict, broke new ground in promotional creativity. Jobs turned to the power of culture to sell his products. He was a marketing genius because he was always appealing to the meaning of life.

snip

If people were longing for technology that was small and beautiful—to borrow E.F. Schumacher’s then-popular slogan—Jobs would give it to them. Apple allowed people who had missed all the important fights of their era to participate in a battle of their own—a battle for progress, humanity, innovation. And it was a battle that was to be won in the stores. As Apple’s marketing director in the early 1980s told Esquire, “We all felt as though we had missed the civil rights movement. We had missed Vietnam. What we had was the Macintosh.” The consumer as revolutionary: it was altogether brilliant, and of course a terrible delusion.





http://www.tnr.com/article/books-and-arts/magazine/100978/form-fortune-steve-jobs-philosopher?passthru=NjBmMzkyYjk0Y2ZlMTY0MzgxYmIzMjY3NDhlMjRiOWM

[msongs]

1. Apple is on a mission...to charge you 50 to 100% more for the same thing lol nt

[grasswire]

2. this explains a lot

It was a brilliant marketing strategy. Apple isn't the only entity to push it. There's a whole life style swarm hitting up those same people.

[arcane1]

3. Such is the nature of "branding"

Nike is another company that excels at it. I'm not a big fan myself, I prefer to let the products succeed or fail on their own merits, not on how the logo makes me feel about myself.

[leveymg]

4. If L. Ron Hubbard can market self-help as religion, Jobs can do the same with consumer electronics.

Same business model.

[GeorgeGist]

5. Siri is God