The brand promise of Apple
This is an Apple ad: — Done by Apple. More on that later. — So, last night I was out to dinner with a bunch of smart people. Folks who run their own companies. Folks who have helped many companies get started. Tech companies.
Context & Ripple Effects
Robert Scoble's post argues that a new Apple ad is really a statement of brand promise — the company selling trust rather than specs. That reading lands eight months after USA Today profiled how Apple had buffed its marketing savvy to a high shine, and two years after Jobs laid out his own roadmap in a Fortune interview, so the brand-as-product framing was already the accepted lens on Apple by late 2007.
What makes the timing awkward is the week around it: Apple admitted its new Leopard application firewall shipped with misleading settings and at least three serious design weaknesses, and a circulating demo showed an iPhone being reached through a webpage by a root-privilege program exposing mail and other data stores. A brand pitched on polish was taking visible dents from its own engineering in the same news cycle.
First-order effects
- Apple's ad campaign now has to coexist with two fresh, confirmed security failures — the Leopard firewall admission and the iPhone root-access demo — meaning every 'it just works' impression is contested by researchers' screenshots in the same feeds.
- Critics have a concrete hook: an analyst publicly called on Apple to repent for its poor social media efforts, giving the brand-promise debate a named antagonist rather than vague grumbling.
Second-order effects
- Rivals positioned as open get a free contrast: Leopard was shown running on the Asus Eee PC, a device its maker deliberately built for tinkering, which highlights how much of Apple's promise depends on keeping users out of the machine.
- Security researchers gain standing to test every Apple claim against reality, since WebKit — open sourced back in 2005 and just updated with ten new features in version 3 — gives them a legitimate window into Apple's code.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, a trust-centered brand becomes a compounding liability: each product-level failure costs more than it would for a competitor because the marketing explicitly promised otherwise, raising the internal stakes for quality control over feature velocity.
- The tension between curated control and user freedom — visible in the locked-down iPhone versus the hackable Eee PC — points toward a structural split in consumer computing between walled gardens and tinkerer platforms.
The trend: Apple's competitive position is shifting from selling specifications to selling a promise of safety and polish, which makes every security stumble a direct referendum on the marketing itself.