If products reflect an organization’s values and an organization’s identity, does Apple’s new iPad tell us something about where Apple as a company is headed?
And, if that’s where Apple is going, do we all want to go there too?
Here’s a proposition:
- Apple as an organization is changing, from an organization that’s “about” creativity to an organization that’s “about” consumption.
- Most consumers haven’t noticed this change, although the tech community is on to it.
- While many consumers won’t care, Apple’s core customers and its biggest fans will feel disappointed by this identity change. Some may even feel betrayed.
Let’s build the argument:
An organization’s products communicate that organization’s identity.
An organization’s products – their physical features, their intended uses, their manufacturing processes, and their marketing strategies — communicate an organization’s values. 
When an organization creates, produces, distributes, and supports a product, that organization makes important choices. The organization places bets on what it thinks consumers want (or need), decides which possibilities it wants its products to support, and decides how it uniquely will make these come about. The organization chooses a physical design, a software platform, and a set of utilities, to support a certain kind of current use.
The organization’s choices also express, demonstrate and create the organization’s vision of the future.
Corporate values = product attributes = corporate brand = product brand
The relationship between an organization’s identity and its products’ defining attributes is like the relationship between the chicken and egg. Neither one comes first, and each depends on the other.
Consumers have an understanding of the organization’s brand (or identity) and see the brand in the organization’s products. And, consumers come to equate the qualities of the product and the attributes of the organization itself.
Nowhere is this interdependency between organizational ‘brand’ and product brand more apparent than at Apple.
Apple’s product brand: What do we think makes Apple products special?
Each Apple product is positioned as a tool to ‘think different’. Apple products emphasize sophisticated visual design, simplicity, sheer beauty, and an “alpha-underdog-ness” that suggests that everything that makes Apple products different from convention also makes them better.
Apple’s organizational brand: Who do we think Apple is? [click to continue…]
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I am an organizational identity and reputation scholar with a PhD in leadership & organizations. I research, write, teach and consult with organizations about the relationships between organizational identity, actions, and purpose. See the 
