How I would rename Apple products
A challenge bestowed
“If you could rename and rearchitect Apple’s portfolio, how would you do it?”
This was the question given to me when I was interviewing for the role of Naming Director at Northbound. And it’s a super interesting question! Like many great questions, the answer is usually: it depends.
Let’s dive into how we might change things for marketers’ most beloved brand.
Brand architecture
Brand architecture development is about systematically clarifying relationships. It’s about creating a clear system of wayfinding for customers and users. It’s about maximizing the equity of your brands to drive business results. Achieving that can mean simplifying complexity, streamlining your brand portfolio, or creating differentiation between your products.
Where is your brand strongest?
Where is it weakest?
Where does is need to work the hardest?
Our job is to work with you to develop and define solutions with clear and actionable organizing principles—the number of brands, solutions areas, product relationships and hierarchies, and the implications for category nomenclature and design.
The age-old dichotomy: a house of brands vs. a branded house. More and more, companies are not necessarily finding one extreme preferable to the other. A “blended house” is largely the standard most companies find themselves in or want to move to.
Are you trying to build a more flexible set of co-existing sub-brands? Are you trying to create more consistency and simplicity? Our goal is to identify what are the key brands that we want to maintain (or create) from a business vision and product roadmap perspective, and which brands if any we want to sunset under the corporate brand or a leading product family brand?
Apple’s portfolio of products
Apple takes a “blended house” approach, mixing unique brand names with descriptive names.
Apple product portfolio timeline
From an architecture and naming perspective, Apple has traditionally grouped products under brand families indicated with distinctive names or parts of names:
Mac / Macintosh
Power-
i-
-Pod
Air-
Apple _____
Over time there’s been a general trend towards fewer products and more consolidation:
“Mac” = computers
“i-” = handhelds
“Apple ____” = other (newer trend)
“Pro” = more features
“Air” = lighter weight or Bluetooth
Strengths and weaknesses
Where is your brand strongest?
Where is it weakest?
Where does it need to work the hardest?
Before analyzing possible architecture models for Apple, we must look at current strengths and weaknesses and measure them against business strategy goals to see what are the best brand levers to pull.
STRENGTHS
Beloved global brand, household name
Premium product quality
Internal integration (a strength if you use their other products)
WEAKNESSES
Slower pace of innovation
Closed system, doesn’t play well with others
Highly-priced products
Too many product iterations, getting more commoditized
Have we been here before?
According to legend, Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 and Marie Kondo’d the portfolio to a simple 2x2 grid of products.
For a brand that traditionally stands for simplicity, is there an opportunity to make like Jobs and cut through the portfolio, creating a new, simplified brand ecosystem?
Strategic considerations
Brand strategy and business strategy are inextricably linked.
Reorganizing or renaming brands in your portfolio should not be taken lightly. No element of your brand is used more often or for a longer period of time than a brand name. So, let’s first look at the opportunity at hand and really understand:
What is our business objective?
How can we achieve that objective through architecture and naming?
Elements of Brand Architecture
Corporate brand
Category / Solution areas / Use cases
Product brands — this is our focus for the exercise, but we must consider what’s above and below
Product names / SKUs
Features / Tools / Ingredients / Technologies
Platforms
Brand work is never done in a vacuum. Before we get to architecture and naming development, we need to understand the business vision and what we’re trying to solve for. Example of some areas we’ll start to explore:
General
What are you hoping to achieve with this brand strategy effort?
What is the biggest challenge or opportunity?
Marketplace & Competition
What do you see as the core market trends impacting the business?
Who are Apple’s top 3-5 competitors? Why? What are they doing well?
Audience
Who is your most valuable customer(s)?
What is most important to them when choosing personal electronics?
What types of experiences are they looking for? in the next 5 years? 10?
What are their pain points?
Brand & Marketing
What is the perception of the Apple brand portfolio today?
What do you think is executed well? Where are the largest gaps?
What are the highest performing product families?
Is there any customer confusion with existing names?
Is there a desire to shift brand perceptions? If so, how and where?
How can Apple communicate more effectively to key audiences?
(Product roadmap) Are there new products on the horizon to consider?
(Product SKUs) Is there an opportunity to clean up SKU tiers / versions?
Creative considerations
Today, Apple’s portfolio tends to play in the descriptive/suggestive area of the naming spectrum, with only a few key arbitrary brand names (Mac).
Different types of names have their own key advantages and drawbacks. When considering rearchitecting the brands in the portfolio, we would use the business context and objectives to help steer towards one type of name or another.
There are benefits and tradeoffs with either end of this spectrum.
LESS BRANDED (GENERIC/DESCRIPTIVE)
Keeps attention focused on the parent brand
Carries over equity from the parent brand
Cost less to launch, seed, and support
In general, consider this strategy if the offerings, audiences, value props, UX, and competitors are more similar.
MORE BRANDED (ARBITRARY/FANCIFUL)
Creates a stand-alone piece of IP
Can create new associations for the parent brand
Requires more resources to launch and support
In general, consider this strategy if the offerings, audiences, value props, UX, and competitors are more distinct.
Practical considerations
When considering a brand name or nomenclature change, we do have to be mindful of some (annoying) practical details.
Trademark availability
Is the mark(s) in question going to be available in key markets and geographies? Are you infringing on another trademark? How protectable is your mark, or how dilute is it?
International linguistics
Are the names appropriate in languages that matter to your customers? If you’re using descriptive words/phrases, will they need to translated in other markets?
SEO
This is especially important for descriptive naming. The reason we recommend snapping to industry standard terminology is because the market often interacts with your brand through search. If you’re not using standard terminology with a clear, organized hierarchy, the almighty algorithm will ignore you, and people will have trouble finding you online.
Apple attempted to file for a trademark on iWatch in 2013 and was promptly smacked down by Swatch. Similarly, iTV, an El Gato trademark, became Apple TV in 2007, although Steve Jobs referred to it in public as “iTV” initially.
Competitive naming trends
It’s also important to evaluate the landscape of competitors and how they name products. And it’s not always in order to do something unique and different. Sometimes it’s beneficial to snap to an industry standard that customers, analysts, and even your own sales team can quickly understand and explain.
Naming trends:
Alphanumerics: everyone indicates new product versions using letters and numbers
Lead with corporate brand: many leverage the parent brand and use descriptive naming. Samsung is the exception: they lean on Galaxy in this space because Samsung’s portfolio is much bigger.
Few hero brands: most competitors highlight one or two hero brands, and keep the rest of the nomenclature standardized. These hero brands tend to be suggestive or arbitrary.
Heroes: Galaxy, Pixel, Nest, Slate, Redmi
Standards: Note, Book, Buds, Watch, Smart, TV, Pad
Strategies for revising Apple’s architecture
Finally. Here are my thoughts on what Apple could do, 6 options.
Strategy 1
Do nothing. Maintaining the status quo is an option, and we should never create change just for change’s sake.
Potential* Pros
No new trademarks necessary
No customer education necessary
Doesn’t disrupt existing brand equity
No work required
Potential* Cons
Doesn’t move the needle in any direction
* “Potential” because we don’t have insight into business strategy and objectives, so it’s impossible to evaluate whether this would be an effective brand strategy.
Strategy 2
Move towards a standard system of descriptively named solutions for all future products: [Apple _____]. Maintain existing sub-brands but don’t create new ones.
Potential Pros
Leverages the equity from the Apple brand
Doesn’t require rebranding or changing any existing brands
Easy maintenance from a trademark and linguistic perspective moving forward
Potential Cons
Could hurt the corporate brand if new products flop
Doesn’t signal something new or different
Little differentiation between products: it just becomes Apple vs. Google (which, arguably is the case today)
Strategy 3
Create a net-new name for a new product (if it meets certain criteria), but don’t change any existing brands.
Potential Pros
A new name (especially from Apple) tends to signals innovation, which is a main problem Apple faces
Could stand out from competitors in the category
Potential Cons
Resources required to launch and educate customers
Resources required to protect and defend trademark
Could make the portfolio more cluttered and difficult to navigate, or turn Apple more into a commoditized house of brands or lose a sense of preciousness
Strategy 4
Create branded categories around form-factor or current experience of existing products, using existing names.
Other groupings:
By hardware vs. software
By products connected to iCloud
By audience
By capabilities and price
Potential Pros
Starts to create a system with organizing principles signaled via naming and architecture
Could clarify product type or usage from the name alone
Potential Cons
Re-educating customers and explaining any changes
Losing good equity from existing product names if changed
Trademark and other practical considerations
Might not be extensible across all sub-brands
Strategy 5
Group all products under a single, existing sub-brand, e.g. i-____.
Potential Pros
Simpler, from a number-of-brands perspective
Maintains the i- prefix association with Apple’s famous brands
Potential Cons
Limiting and not that ownable at this point (e.g. iHome is an existing product, not owned by Apple)
Doesn’t help signal differentiation between products
Re-educating customers and explaining the change
Losing decades of good equity from sub-brands
Trademark and other practical considerations
Strategy 6 (last one, promise)
Kill all sub-brands and create a more monolithic approach using only the corporate brand: [Apple _____].
Potential Pros
Simpler, from a number-of-brands perspective
Fewer resources needed to defend trademarks (Apple is the only trademark)
Potential Cons
Unnecessary move – this strategy is good for a company that wants to show how far their corporate brand can stretch, but Apple isn’t in this position
Re-educating customers and explaining the change
Losing decades of good equity from sub-brands
Trademark and other practical considerations
Could hurt the corporate brand if new products flop
Summary and recommendation
Strategy 4 — Top recommendation
This strategy takes a page out of Steve Jobs’s book: simplify the portfolio and use naming to signal use case, form factor, audience, compatibility, or other variable. It starts to create a system with organizing principles that apply across products, and it begins to give customers a sense of what they can expect when they are looking at a new product.
Strategy 3 — Runner up
We do know that for all its enviable brand equity, one of Apple’s key challenges to address is its pace of innovation. Samsung and Google crank out new products annually and can afford to be more experimental. Apple on the other hand is much more considered and restrained (which is also part of its appeal). Creating a net-new brand for a critical new product could help signal to the market that Apple isn’t done innovating yet.
Conclusion
If branding were a food chain, Apple would be near the top. They’re the first trillion dollar company. They are the envy of many consumer brands—their awareness, loyalty, product quality, experience is matched by few if any.
In order to really recommend a brand evolution, we would need to understand the business strategy—the specific objectives that internal teams and executives are trying to accomplish. We would need to answer questions like:
What are key trends in the market affecting the business?
Who is the target audience and what message are we trying to send to them?
What challenges does our brand portfolio face today?
What is the product roadmap 1-2 years out, 3-5?
Without answers to these questions, we can only speculate that it makes sense from a simplicity perspective to reduce the portfolio to a few select brands grouped by type, audience, or use case.
