The Mac Philes: brand identity, technology and self image
According to Mac users, Mac users have always had more fun. But now they have “empirical” evidence to back it up. So, are they enlightened operators and creators or smug, brainwashed androids?
The technology news site Tom’s Hardware recently reported that according to Mindset Media, “open minded liberal thinkers” are more likely to purchase a Mac:
Open minded people are more likely to purchase a Mac, according to a new survey released by Mindset Media. The company interviewed 7500 people and found that liberal thinkers were 60 percent more likely to buy a Mac. These same people were also less modest and more sure of their own superiority than the rest of the population.
Other stories constructed from Mindset’s press release state that “these purchasers are also more liberal, less modest, and more assured of their own superiority than the population at large.” This information raises a whole lotta questions, and it led me to wonder (if that’s a mental process that cuboid PC users such as myself are capable of) if this survey didn’t say more about Mindset than it did about Mac?
The presentation of the data available on most news sites is woolly at best. The survey was conducted using Nielsen’s Online panel with 7,500 survey respondents, but as Tom’s Hardware point out, very little has been said about the actual methodology. How were these more-liberal/more-smug respondents selected? Self-selected, or company selected? And how were they distinguished from the rest of the population? What were the purchase options? Such technicalities are of course less interesting than manufactured either/or scenarios, especially during Macworld 2008.
It’s a well-conceived release on the part of Mindset, coinciding with Macworld, with millions of Mac fans combing the web for the latest offerings wanting to have their purchasing habits re-enforced. Mindset even alerted me to a buzzword - psychographic - to distinguish psychological profile from the reams of other factors that comprise consumer populations. Here’s what they offer:
So what kind of people identify with your brand? Assertive? Creative? Spontaneous? [...] You may see any of the dozens of MindsetProfiles we’ve already created, or you can work with us and Nielsen Online to create a custom MindsetProfile for your unique target.
What person would not identify with those adjectives at one time or other? And what company, I wonder, would identify their target group as dull? Obsessive? Thick? Impulsive? Or flustered? Categories that we all fall into at one time or another, but which some marketers are loathe to broach. Market profiling is apparently a necessity these days, but I have to wonder whose interests, apart from marketing agencies, it serves to perpetuate this kind of self-congratulatory pseudo-science?
Presumably, Mindset can match a predetermined target group with the product in question and create a series of protocols & strategies for marketing to that group. Yet Apple surely doesn’t need it, having a marketing department who wrote the rules on technological branding. Still, Mindset have proven that they can tell people what they want to hear. It’s no secret Mac users associate deeply with the aesthetic and technical attributes of their chosen computing platform, and releasing a survey confirming that link is surely like shooting fish in a barrel. What about other brands though? For instance, what kind of psychographic buys piles medication?
But I digress. I still haven’t answered the original false dilemma posed in this blog, namely, are Mac users confident creative types or brainwashed prats? The answer is of course both/and rather than either/or. No, just kidding. We’ve got 4 dedicated Mac users in Texperts Towers, and I’ve conducted my own rigorously empirical survey to see what makes ‘em tick.
Fred Cheung, one of Texperts’ fabulous wizards, is actually a developer for Mac and I can confirm that he’s a creative and effective individual who, though frequently quiet and slightly eccentric, will never turn down a chance to assert his own superiority. And he’s right. How irritating.
Darrern Brierton is a talented graphic designer, web monkey, and former philosophy lecturer. He also fits the profile. Dammit.
Henry Addison is another whiz-bang techie who plays by no rules other than those created by him, Henry Addison. But he’s not particularly brand conscious, our Henry. He digs things wot work consistently and quickly. Creative? Does rowing count? Of course it does.
And finally, Texperts CTO Paul Butcher is also a technical ace, as you’d expect, as well as sagely and imaginative. But he’s also a former pc user. What gives?
I find his Mac conversion the most interesting one. As an experiment, he calculated the amount of time per day that he lost waiting for his mighty PC laptop to fully start up and shut down. It came out to a whopping half hour. He purchased a smokin’ Macbook shortly thereafter, and has not looked back. Rather than any brand identity, then, Paul opted solely for functionality. But given some of the limitations that beset the first release of the iPhone, why was Paul first in line when they were unveiled in the UK? I was going to launch into a clever, ‘ah, see, they got you to buy into their image after all’ jibe, finally trouncing Texperts Towers’ arch-pragmatist with a ’style-over-substance’ riposte to dismantle his consumer aesceticism once and for all. But as I should know by now, the answer was a simple, eminently sensible consideration. After persistently cursing various Windows smartphones, Paul wanted a device that did most of the things it was supposed to very well, rather than something that did everything badly. Its styling and cool web interface were merely bonus features. Or so he claims…
So with all of its talk of ‘brand identification’ and aesthetic infatuation, functionality has something to do with the equation after all. That’ll be £1.2 m. You want psychographics with that?
