Not everyone identifies with one personification or the other yet; some are still trying to define who they are, and thus which guy in the ad they are, by what they decide to do and what they decide to buy. So if one is made fun of, who cares? That guy’s not me.

My younger brother is a recent college graduate. As far as I have observed, everyone he knows has an iBook which their parents bought for them when they went off to school. We got him one for graduation, instead of another PC, so that his friends would be able to help him use it. This isn’t a cross section of the 18-24 market, of course; I’m only looking at one of the smaller and more expensive private liberal arts schools. But less and less patience and affluence is required to bring that choice to all the teens on MySpace.

I think the point of this ad is not to make fun of PC users (it might, but oh well), but to take that choice and transform it from something about latte-sipping artist types who can’t understand why you would ever use such an inferior platform to something framed in the language and cultural identifiers that these kids have.

Does it work? Not perfectly, maybe. But it does accomplish something, and not by accident. Someone must have given some thought to what was wrong with the Ellen Feiss spot.

It seems a little simplistic to generalize about an entire ad campaign working (or not) without any data to back it up, other than ones own observations. From an anthropological perspective, I can understand the impulse to rate somethings significance based on a select number of indivitual sources (ie opinions/reactions). But based soley on my own, both on and off of this comment board, the opposite of what you’re saying seems to be true. You might need a bigger research pool.

As a marketeer, my experience has been that Apples campaign has been both a success virally, commerically, and in terms of the responce it has evoked from those who do disagree or disapprove (though the do indeed seem to be in the minority – PC user or Mac users alike).

Apple is advertising the integration of life-stuff (not just business) into their products. If anything is clear, it is that this is the way things are headed. Machines are no longer just data tools – they are portals to the world, and the device that assists us in shaping our identities.

People find meaning in varied ways. The more Apple enables meaning-making, the more relevance it will have in the coming years. So why not market it?

This seems like a place where your anthropology needs leavening from your economics. Okay, let’s grant that some of the characterization of the machines is meant to rub off on the machine owner. For a lot of people (yourself) that’s a turn-off. But is Apple trying to convert everyone? Or are they selling to the margin? The people who are already intrigued by the Apple style, and are growing increasingly tired of the Microsoft/PC hassles.

Now, it may not be worthwhile to aggravate the rest of the PC-owner public. But maybe it is. Is it impossible to say that Apple hasn’t done well by cultivating a bit of us-versus-them mentality? Isn’t that brand loyalty that plenty of other companies would die to have?

And I say this as someone who long ago adopted a stringent anti-Apple position, but who’s been softening ever since.

As a long-time user of PCs and PC-laptops, I think that Macs are really aspirational. I want one. I don’t have one because my organization has standardized IT and provides only PC-based systems.

However, one of the reasons that Macs are cool is because so few people have them – they are designed to stand out and they do.

If all the guys in the neighbouring cubes had Macs or iBooks, I wonder how cool and aspirational they would be.

So the marketing challenge for Apple, given their brand image, is how do they capture the mainstream market without losing the brand attributes which make them different and attractive?

Reynold

The ads personify the MACHINES and then rely on the identification mechanism you posit to cause PC USERS to say “That doesn’t belong with me!” Unlike the old lemming ad, the PC user isn’t being attacked–he’s being flattered implicitly by being told “You’re too good for this crap.”

The thing I find odd is that Apple’s design aesthetic — with everything in blacks and whites and chrome, and a uniform succession of white bulbs and boxes with gently rounded corners — is an aesthetic that screams 1950′s futurism and people going about in unisex Dr. Evil suits.

But they’ve managed to make their advertising image the scruffy young man up there.

Whereas PCs, with their unkempt tangle of wires, their mismatched monitors and tower cases and keyboards, their sloppy innards, and their lint-filled fans, somehow get pegged as the man in the grey flannel suit.

I’ve always thought that seemed completely backwards, ever since the first “Think Different” ad I saw back in (I think) the late 90′s. There’s what seems (to me) to be this screaming dissonance between their product design and their image. And yet it works for them! How did they pull it off?

I guess there is some smugness in the delivery, but it actually works pretty well. They aren’t my favorite Apple spots, but unlike you, I see them as clearly targeting the non-Apple user (not me, an apple loyalist).