Halo Brands: The Difference Between Apple and Microsoft
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
Posted by Saleem Barnard
* This blog post is part of Invoke’s participation in the 2008 Vancouver Blogathon for Charity
From time to time, a company comes out with a brilliant product: clean, sleek, easy to use, and down right sexy. However, something even more rare and interesting than this is the halo brand – a brand that can do no wrong and spits out brilliant products. One worth mentioning is Apple.
Apple has proved themselves with their strong product success rate and high rate of user satisfaction. As with the case with the iPhone, just the mention of Apple creating a mobile phone created organic buzz, spin-off fan sites, and skyrocketing demand for a product that was just in the idea stage. Ultimately, few were disappointed with the final product. But the rarity lies in the amount of trust consumers vest in Apple. Everything they touch turns to cool. If Apple started selling re-bar, you would see trend setters carry around the various Apple colours like a patriot waving his flag.
Microsoft, oh Microsoft, is in a very different, and far less attractive boat. Take the Zune for example. Zune, their attempt at an iPod killer, does have superior technical specifications; but it just lacks. Brown as a core colour? Brown??
A cow in a pretty red dress is still a cow. The parent brand, plagued by “blah” publicity of their product launches and a growing increase in the love-to-hate attitude, falls flat by trying too hard to appear cool. You can’t create cool. Especially if the vision of cool is brown.
