How Apple is Using Authentic Marketing to Dominate

Apple and Liquid Death have almost nothing in common, except for the fact that each of them is accepted as the best company in their industry at marketing. They know how to tell stories, they know how to appeal to emotion, and they know how to make you desire their products. But what strikes me is that each of them do it in their own unique way. Liquid Death’s marketing is substantially different than Apple’s, and it should be – they have a completely different culture and voice. However, both Apple and Liquid Death target emotional appeals and leverage similar themes to encourage people to buy their product.

Apple’s best marketing campaign of all time is NOT 1984

During the Super Bowl in 1984, Apple released one of the most famous, and most successful commercials of all time. It was completely unique, unconventional, and 100% authentic to the iconoclastic nature of Apple. 1984, in addition to Apple’s [the Crazy ones] commercial, are widely accepted as two of the best marketing campaigns of all time, and I agree 100% with that. However, Apple is in the middle of what I believe is their best marketing campaign of all time, and most people don’t even realize what they’re marketing.

‍

The Authentic Marketing Rulebook (Rule #1): Know Your Endgame

Marketers always need to know the endgame while everyone else is still trying to operate in the opening. To stick with a chess analogy, marketers should ALWAYS be playing with the white pieces, forcing lines and dictating the pace of the game. To do this, marketers need to be in lockstep with business leaders, constantly staying updated with plans and ideas. Good marketers help a brand succeed today, but great marketers set a brand up to crush in the future. Let’s look at an example of this that we’re in the middle of today. Remember when I said that we’re in the middle of Apple’s greatest marketing campaign of all time?

Apple’s ‘Privacy’ campaign is Apple’s greatest marketing campaign of all time.

‍

In 2019, Apple launched a campaign targeted at showing consumers that Apple cares about privacy more than any other company. To most consumers, this looked like a nice campaign designed to attract new consumers who want to prioritize privacy in their life, but when we dig under the surface of this campaign we quickly realize that this campaign is much, much larger than that. 

A quick side note – having worked in cyber security as an ethical hacker for the first couple of years of my career, I can assure you that consumers don’t care about privacy. People who care about privacy don’t post geotagged photos of their vacations in real time, they don’t use passwords that are a variation of ‘SeasonYear!’ to protect their corporate documents or even their life savings, and they certainly don’t save their credit card to every website they visit so they don’t have to type in the numbers each time. People love the convenience that a little bit less privacy affords them – personalized ads, autofilled credit cards, quick screening at the airport, really fun and interesting content on social media. Apple knows that people don’t care about privacy as much as they think they do, and they are exploiting that fact with their best marketing campaign yet.

The Authentic Marketing Rulebook (Rule #2): Talk to the Right People

In Apple’s Privacy campaign, they’re not talking to consumers; they want you to think they’re talking to consumers. In reality, they’re talking to small business owners and government regulators. They’re talking to small business (SMB) owners because- to use our chess analogy again- they know they have the white pieces and they are in an attacking position that is forcing SMB owners to defend their position or risk totally crumbling. What do I mean by this? I’ll explain shortly. They’re talking to government regulators because Apple’s strategic business moves relies on monopolizing several markets, and they need to be viewed as the white knight rather than a monopolistic entity.

How Apple’s Marketing is Pacifying Small Business Owners

Remember Rule #1 of the Authentic Marketing Playbook? Using the white pieces, Apple launched an offensive marketing campaign passively accusing other massive companies of laundering data and not protecting user privacy. Although never said directly, Apple’s main attacks were targeted at Meta (formerly Facebook) and Google, and for simplicity I'll talk mostly about their battle with Meta. Why would Apple attack Meta? Apple isn’t a social media company, and Meta isn’t trying to become a hardware company besides in the VR world. At the beginning of Apple’s marketing campaign, their reasons weren't abundantly clear, but when Apple released iOS 14.5, everything became crystal clear. In iOS 14.5, Apple released a software update that severely handicapped Meta’s ability to serve personalized ads and track the success of those ads. If this was a chess match, Meta just lost its Queen in exchange for just one of Apple’s pawns. Interestingly, although Apple’s iOS update looked like a huge hit for the social media giant (thanks to Apple’s excellent marketing), the real blow was dealt to small business owners, many of whom rely on Meta’s industry-standard algorithms that allow them to put their product in front of qualified individuals who are likely to want to purchase their product. This has enabled a whole ecosystem of entrepreneurs, and Apple dealt a crushing blow to them with one simple iOS update. Even though Apple’s update had massive negative consequences to this demographic of individuals pursuing the American dream, the narrative around Apple’s update was entirely about the privacy benefits and why Meta was the bad guy for using people’s data for personalized ads. This is why this is Apple’s best marketing campaign ever. 

Remember when I said no one cares about privacy? They don’t! Yet most people think they do! Without going into the technical specifications, just trust me when I say that Meta serving you personalized ads is NOT an invasion of your privacy. Mark Zuckerberg does NOT have the ability to go check your Instagram scrolling history and serve you up an ad for fuzzy slippers because he think you’ll like them. Everything is anonymized and automated, and it’s really effective. You get the products you want, and you enable entrepreneurs to pursue their dreams and actually succeed. But that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that Apple had the white pieces and they made sure the narrative didn’t go that way. They steered us into an endgame that made them a hero. But still, how does this help Apple make more money? Let's continue.

Apple’s second ear in the room: federal regulators

Apple’s marketing tactics are not just aimed at pacifying small business owners or making Meta look like an evil corporation that everyone needs Apple’s help being saved from. They’re also aimed at telling federal regulators that there’s nothing monopolistic happening here. In Peter Thiel’s “Zero to One”, he talks about the idea that companies who don’t have a true competitive monopoly like to talk and market as if they do. Ever seen an HR software talking about how they’re empowering the future and changing the world? That’s what Thiel is talking about. But Thiel also talks about how the companies who have a true monopolistic advantage hide it at all costs and begin making it seem like they don’t have a true advantage. Google does this exceptionally well by dabbling with phones and self-driving cars while absolutely raking in money with their search product, which maintains a complete monopoly and brings in enormous profits for Google. Apple is doing the exact same thing right now. They are crushing social media companies because they want to hold all the data. Why? Because post-Steve Jobs Apple is no longer about creating the best, most innovative hardware on the planet. Tim Cook is leading Apple into being the leading software and services company on the planet, leveraging their hardware monopoly to create a new monopoly in this generation’s oil: Data. While trying to take down Meta in the name of privacy, Apple stealthily launched their own personalized ad network. And guess what? It uses your data to serve you personalized advertisements. They handicapped a competitor’s product and launched their own and most people don’t even realize it. Apple is planning their endgame 10-15 moves ahead, and they’re going to win because of it. 

Whether or not you agree with Apple’s tactics are irrelevant for this conversation, because what matters is that Apple used the tenets of Authentic Marketing to execute the greatest marketing campaign in their history, and most consumers haven’t even realized what’s happening.

The Authentic Marketing Rulebook (Rule #3): Do what is Authentic to You.

The last reason that Apple’s marketing campaign has worked is that it is authentic to their company ethos. Since their inception, Apple has been about being iconoclastic and pushing boundaries, so their drastic attack on social media companies wasn’t too surprising. They’ve also always been about privacy. Truly. Remember the famous case where the FBI wanted Apple to unlock a terrorist’s phone and they refused? The FBI also wanted Apple to build a backdoor so they could unlock any Apple phone at the government’s request. Apple refused and began building their brand about privacy. They’ve never sold data to Cambridge Analytica, they’ve never had a public data leak on a large scale like so many other entities, and as a result, their privacy push was well received.

Think about the sentiment around TikTok vs Apple. If TikTok released a campaign about the privacy value of using TikTok it would be highly inauthentic and highly ineffective. Instead, TikTok recognizes that most people (especially young people) don’t care about privacy, so their marketing is about entertainment and being a part of the newest trends. They know their endgame, they know who they’re talking to, and they’re doing it in a way that’s authentic to them.

How to leverage Authentic Marketing for your business

If you want more customers coming to you, if you want to be the expert in your field, and if you want awareness that actually drives revenue, you need to focus on Authentic Marketing. Authentic Marketing can be done in house or through the assistance of an agency, but an absolute requirement is ensuring that the agency or in-house marketing leader is working hand-in-hand with top executives to be able to strategize a chess match that works for you. This requires a partner who doesn’t just understand creative, but truly understands how to create business value, and who understands how that can be best executed for you and your business. Since every business is different, make sure you’re leveraging a partner who is adaptable, problem solving, and quick to learn.

The Courtside Group is a marketing and creative agency in Dallas, TX that created the Authentic Marketing framework and serves companies who want actionable marketing campaigns that are going to drive measurable ROI. We’ve worked with decades-old B2B firms, VC-backed startups, bootstrapped CPG brands, and everyone in between. If you’d like to request a consultation, where our team will evaluate your current marketing execution and discuss your business goals, please click the link below. We look forward to being in touch.

‍