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by Online Editor | Sean

on Nov 24

Hello and a godly thought

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Disclosure

By way of disclosure, I’m no Microsoft fanboy. This has been written on a Mac, using Pages. I love Apple products and software, I’m just stunned by the disconnect with the in-store experience. Also, having perved on the new 27 inch iMac I must say Iwanonenow!

Given some of the less erudite among Marketingmag.com.au’s audience shun our print offering, now seems a good time to combine my first blog with an online ‘allo! The fact that I promised this blog would be out in the December/January issue and that hits newsstands tomorrow has ever-so-little to do with it.

I’m a northerner. To plagiarise from my November Online/Offline:

“Hi. My name is Sean Greaney (Grey-knee), I don’t have a drinking problem and I loathe long walks on the beach. Similar to my predecessor I hail from the north. Well, not quite so ‘north’ and from a place with far fewer cumulonimbi. A sleepy little town (great campaign!) occasionally suffixed with ‘Vegas’.”

This means there’s a few things I’ve not done. I’m yet to board the Neighbours tour bus, eat a meat pie at the MCG or be thrown out of the ‘Espy’. I’m rectifying this: by working my way through the Yarra Valley, I’ve taken in an AFL match and I seem to be the only person in the state who enjoys the odd VB. And a rite of welcome I’ve heard far too enthusiastically and often is a visit to thesouthernhemisphere’slargestshoppingcentre – said with precisely that many pauses.

And that’s exactly where this weekend past found me: Chadstone Shopping Centre. I was naively disconnected and ill prepared for the shamelessness and zealotry of the luxury pantheon’s supplicants (read: Gucci, Chanel, Tiffany’s). The scene below got me thinking...

luxurypantheon
  • It's not the most original analogy, but the above certainly crystallizes it: brands are the new gods.

Humans were once simple creatures when it came to identity. We drew from three elements: what we are, do and profess to think. For ages, this meant our identity was located in profession, gender, family name and religion.

Then the fates decided to make me into a liar by complicating everything. The functions of each element remain the same (are, do, think), but the fortuitous rise of the ‘individual’ meant each element had to be idiosyncratic, informed by its own lexicon and temporally agile. In the West at least, 'family name' lost its inheritable meaning. Gender got incredibly complex and rode off into the sunset to a land called ‘beyond the scope of this blog’. Profession grew equally complex. Finally, despite a membership decline, the spirit of religion remains. The old gods may’ve died, but phoenixes of an entirely different mind were born of their ashes.

Of course, every well-packaged God has a portfolio, icon, avatar and temple (read: brand promise, logo, evangelist and presence). Broadly speaking, it seems the temples suffer most. As demonstrated above, the luxury pantheon have temples sorted. It’s the class-warrior (or denier?) gods that are leaving prayers unanswered.

In my (infuriating) research, Apple’s mass was furthest from its promise. Maybe it’s my tall-poppy syndrome flaring up, maybe it’s my jealousy at all the cool stuff the Australian Macworld editor gets, and maybe I’m just plagiarising.

“It just works” – Apple’s chant isn’t the issue here. Apple plays to the individual. Apple has brilliantly and subtly made us believe we’re creative for using Apple – irrespective of the fact we’re actually researching car insurance. If you own an Apple, you're part of a very cool, black-square-rimmed-wearing cadre of hipsters – a minority. You might live in Inala, but you’ll be forgiven for hallucinating San-Fran trams on your way to work.

A visit to their store – er, temple – will give a decidedly different impression to that implied by Apple. A stressed manager hovering over a trainee. The Genius Bar ‘Geniuses’ sweating through a queue of disgruntled “It just works” customers, behind them a digital sign informing no appointments available today. A displeased customer being booked in for a 10am consultation for the next day. A number of alien limbs annexing my, um, private space. A lopsided gathering eyeing off each other for a chance to caress the mouse, tweak the keyboard and ogle the screen.

Is this just a case of the archdiocese being too far out of the Vatican – er, California’s influence? Apparently not.

All this is an incredibly hard-to-resolve conflict of egalitarianism and making the individual feel special. If we’re to move from flirtation to worship (brand evangelists) the in-temple wine had better not be Passion Pop.

Over to you:

  • Was my experience unusual?
  • Will this retail experience significantly damage the brand?
  • How can Apple tackle this?

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3 Comments

Craig Pearce
  • Wrote on 28 Nov, at 08:21PM
I'm sorry, but what was this post about? What was the point? It was all over the place and did not obey any normal online writing protocol (just a couple of examples: cut to the chase/point in the opening para, short paras, give us a freaking clue what is going on here etc).

Marketing mag and its online equivalent is not particularly relevant or useful to me as a communication professional at the moment in my opinion and needs to do better.

Weeding out yack-fests like this would be a good start.
Editor | Sean
  • Wrote on 30 Nov, at 08:49AM
Morning Craig,

Sorry you didn't like it. But your timing is perfect, we're now conducting our reader's survey and would like to get your suggestions: http://www.marketingmag.com.au/reader-survey/.

Have a great week.
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