Apple Frenzy
The second largest Apple retail store in the world opened up in Sydney on George street last thursday. It is also the largest in the southern hemisphere, plus it has the longest genius bar in the entire world.
I managed to pop in the following day and I have to admit… it is one of the most visually stunning stores I have ever seen. Standing 3 stories high, the entire building is a work of art using glass. You feel as if you have walked into a shrine of cutting edge technology, and one thing apple knows is how to deliver it, starting from marketing all the way up to end user experience. The store itself stands out from everything else i can think of in the city. A guy who has never even bothered to try a mac in his life would get sucked into the store helpless, as if an alien spaceship is using a tractor beam to pull him in.
If there’s one company that has proved focus on branding can get you where you want to be, that’s Apple. My personal belief is branding either makes or breaks a business. Stray away slightly from your branding principles and you could be heading towards disaster. Apple has made significant changes along the way, they are opening up to enterprise software more and more which gives them the edge in expanding their target market, and the introduction of intel chips to their mac range along with bootcamp has given the PC audience an opportunity they never had but always wished for. They have managed to do all this without damaging their brand, and I am a big fan of those ‘mac vs pc’ ads which shows these changes in a really fun way, but most importantly people ‘get it’.
I guess the opening of the new store is a significant milestone for them. Apple is slowly expanding their territory market wise, technology wise and location wise. With vista being the most hated OS to-date(at least by me), and with more and more people getting used to convergence, Apple has a big chance of converting people to their products and platforms.
Soon we’ll be hearing “Once you go Mac, you never go back….”?
