The Apple Brand Personality
Apple has a branding strategy that focuses on the emotions. The starting point is how an Apple product experience makes you feel. The Apple brand personality is about lifestyle; imagination; liberty regained; innovation; passion; hopes, dreams and aspirations; and power-to-the-people through technology.
The Apple brand personality is also about simplicity and the removal of complexity from people's lives; people-driven product design; and about being a really humanistic company with a heartfelt connection with its customers.
Apple Brand Equity and Apple's Customer Franchise
The Apple brand is not just intimate with its customers, it's loved, and there is a real sense of community among users of its main product lines.
The brand equity and customer franchise which Apple embodies is extremely strong. The preference for Apple products amongst the "Mac community", for instance, not only kept the company alive for much of the 90's (when from a rational economic perspective it looked like a dead duck) but it even enables the company to sustain pricing that is at a premium to its competitors.
It is arguable that without the price-premium which the Apple brand sustains in many product areas, the company would have exited the personal computer business several years ago. In recent years, this strength in brand preference has flowed directly to Apple's profits - the company has dramatically improved its manufacturing costs, while still maintaining very strong brand equity.