A friend of mine sent me a link with an iPod-packaging parody. It is funny indeed, but an old hat to an advertising fellow like me. My work in advertising included a lot of branding and thinking and conception work, involving brand philosophies. So this is a natural habitat for me. It reminded me a lot to the discussions we had with clients, over and over, about “using white space” and “adding emphasis” with bulleted lists or “consumer benefit lines”… This kind of discussion always came with packaging as well as with print ads.
Apple is an extremely focussed, minimalist-style company. It has a strong focus on direction and is obsessed with purity and simplicity, mainly because Steve Jobs and Johnathan Ives are Zen-driven gurus. If the CEO says “We have a simple product and I want a simple packaging”, there is no room to argue about that.
Besides, Apple has a different market position than Microsoft. Microsoft creates mainly software products (I think their only hardware is a mouse), and naturally, Microsofts software is placed on a shelf of boxes where thousands of other titles are competing. So in that same shelf, you would never find an iPod placed. A software packaging is also very different, it has indeed bulleted text, it has features, vendor logos — Apple software products are not much different in packaging from other vendors. It is still a little bit cleaner though.
The iPod is iconic, it stands out by itself as a product already. It is featured in Apple Stores mainly, or third party stores dedicated to Apple products, or at least in a corner with Apple products. People buying an iPod are getting one because they were looking for that Apple boot or that Apple Store. Standing in front of a shelf filled with Microsoft software boxes, these people simply don’t think about iPods.
It is also true that Microsoft has a different selling philosophy than Apple. Microsoft allures people by making them feel secure that they choose the right product. Microsoft’s brand language is “Look, I’m the mother of all software. I am the de facto standard, so you can’t go wrong with me!”. Looking at it that way, everything Microsoft adds to a packaging underlines this approach.
Comments