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Apple’s takes a transparent approach to marketing its brand.  Its honest, uncompromising method appeals directly to our current generation’s growing disillusionment with indirect, padded, or sugarcoated approaches.  In this chaotic age of information overload, people have less and less patience for deception in advertising, and Apple is receptive to this mindset.

Directly related to this advertising approach is Apple’s preoccupation with continuing to expand its following.  It strives to appeal directly to PC users who are dissatisfied with the performance of Windows and PCs in an attempt to convert them to the Mac world.  To achieve this end, it stresses the relative ease of acclimating to the Mac operating system—likely the chief reason for many potential converts' trepidation—as well as switching from a PC to Mac, by including a series of useful tutorials (again presented in video format for maximum convenience).

Role in Popular Culture

Macs are commonly regarded as the “anti-PC” in society, and Apple does not shy from this comparison.  To underpin its straightforward marketing approach, the website includes a video section that grants any Web user instant access to every Apple television ad, past and present.  By doing so, Apple shows itself eager to cultivate the Mac’s perceived role as the alternative to the PC world.

The company’s most recent TV commercials center around the backlash against Microsoft’s Windows Vista and overtly reference its alleged inferiority to the Mac OS X Leopard.  The ads portray two men who serve as foils to the PC (a conniving, bespectacled middle-aged man dressed in corporate business attire) and the Mac (a friendly, fashionably dressed young adult played by famous actor Justin Long).   The rhetoric involved with these advertisements encourages a stereotype that Mac users are “hip” and have their finger more closely on the pulse of today’s generation, whereas PC users are outdated, stodgy, and/or square.

Some have argued that Apple’s campaign strategy is snobby and elitist for stereotyping PC users in this manner, and as such can be interpreted as somewhat anticompetitive.  But to the company’s credit, it is upfront and uncompromising in its stance, and this ultimately displays Apple as a company that is highly confident in the quality of its products.