Gold Magazine May - June 2013, Issue 26 | Seite 82

A Victim of its
Own Success

THE LAST
WORD

Is Apple losing its shine?
By Peter Economides

I love my eleven inch Macbook Air.
But when I see a grey-suited, whiteshirted, maroon- tied, elderly, conservative
gentleman with an Apple Macbook Air on
his lap, it does something to me! It makes
me want to distance myself from my own
Macbook Air. And that’s not good for
Apple.
There’s a growing sense that Apple is
losing its shine. And ubiquity has a lot
to do with it. It’s when successful brands
become the victim of their own success.
Apple has a few other problems too. And
they all point in the same direction.
Last month, I spent some time in the
office of the Global CMO of one of the
world’s best brands. A brand that he can
fairly say he had a major hand in creating.
The walls of his Amsterdam office were
lined with ads, posters, packaging and other
bits of branded material in a good sample
of the world’s major languages. All with a
consistent look. All with a consistent feel.
Like any global brand. But not a watereddown, middle-of-the-road, lowest common
denominator kind of consistency. This is
consistently with attitude. Consistently
with edge. Consistently with a point
of view. Consistently with style. Like a
handful of great global brands.
This guy is an expressive, compelling,
interesting CMO. Some call him
opinionated. I prefer to call him a man
with an opinion (it’s not the same). A man
with the indepen [