🧪 Apple’s Banned Words

Read time: 3 mins | Read online

Welcome to another edition of Brand Chemistry!

This week we’re getting into the brand case studies, and why not kick off with the most valuable company in the world.

I posted on Linkedin a little while back about a trick I noticed Apple using to position themselves in a category of their own and avoid direct competition. Sometimes it’s clever, sometimes it’s a little sneaky, but either way I haven’t been able to un-see it in everything they’ve done since.

Hope you enjoy!

— Isaac

Quick Hits

• The online world of 'Severance', some official and some fan-made [TechCrunch]

• Calm is a $300M/year meditation app. They don’t mention “meditation” in their marketing. [Linkedin]

• How Clay repositioned from “personalised outreach” to “GTM enablement” [Strategy Breakdowns]

• 72% of B2B Marketers are overwhelmed by AI [Linkedin]

• Rare Beauty CMO on winning Gen Z through community-oriented marketing [Marketing Dive]

Apple’s Banned Words

First impressions are important. As human beings we instinctively try to categorise or place things in a certain box. To frame them in the context of things we already know. That’s why when you meet someone new you ask where they went to school or what they do for work. Entirely subconsciously, you try to understand what ‘type’ of person they are based on the other people you know.

Apple knows this is how human brains work, so they make sure you categorise them only in the way they want you to. Not alongside competitors, but in a category of their own. This prevents direct comparison and objective benchmarking and makes you evaluate their products more subjectively and emotionally.

There’s a reason they’re the largest company in the world, with a market cap of $3.68 trillion (yep, trillion with a “T”!)

I found myself down a rabbit hole of old Apple product launches, marketing, and interviews. Turns out they consistently avoid words across three distinct categories to help position their brand and product in a category of their own.

1. Categories

Apple could have rocked up 10+ years late to the party and tried to compete. Instead, they strategically positioned their Vision Pro not as a “VR headset” but as their first ever “spatial computer”. Seriously. You won’t find the words “virtual reality” anywhere in Apple’s comms about the Vision Pro. And the only time “augmented reality” is mentioned is to view an AR model of the Vision Pro from your iPhone or iPad.

Even now with other companies innovating in the headset space, no one else has a “spatial computer” on the market. Everyone is competing with VR/AR headsets while Apple watches on, winning every time by creating their own category so they only compete against themselves.

2. Technologies

AI is easily the biggest buzzword of the early 2020s. Ever since ChatGPT stepped onto the scene in 2023 the entire world has spun into an AI frenzy. Google were quick on the uptake, mentioning “AI” over 140 times at their 2023 developer conference only a few months after ChatGPT launched.

All eyes were on Apple when their event rolled around later that year. With expectations high, the world watched as they mentioned “AI” exactly… zero times. Besides introducing the Vision Pro it was fairly uneventful, only announcing minor updates to existing products and software.

Then a full year later at their 2024 developer conference, the AI hype had persisted and it was clear Apple would need to come to the party in some way. This time they did talk about “AI”. But in true Apple fashion, it wasn’t “Artificial Intelligence”. It was “Apple Intelligence”.

So while Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and everyone else were competing against each other with Generative AI chatbots, Apple positioned themselves as a different category altogether. One that no one else could compete in.

3. Metrics

The longest running example I could find of Apple being strategically selective with word choices was to do with benchmarking metrics. When they announce a new iPhone model, you might remember hearing them say something along the lines of “it has the best battery life ever in an iPhone” or “it’s the fastest iPhone yet”.

Notice how they don’t show the real performance statistics? Only “X% faster” than previous models. This makes it literally impossible to compare their products to any competitors because there isn’t a consistent metric to benchmark.

You can only compare Apple’s products to their previous versions, which means every new model is always “the best ever”. They’re not saying “this is the best performance currently on the market”. They’re saying “this is better performance than what we had before”, which you kind of assume will always be the case.

But that’s the point! With this framing, every new product they release will always be “the best” because it’s in a category of its own, only compared to previous models.

They’ve done it again with the new iPhone 16e, specifically the battery life comparison section on the website. It only lets you compare against a handful of previous models, the most recent being the 3rd gen iPhone SE which was released in 2022. Compared to a 3+ year old phone, the new iPhone 16e’s battery will always look incredible.

It’s easy to focus only on what you are saying when it comes to comms or marketing.

“I think ’exclusive’ sounds better than ‘premium’ for that social post”.

But Apple’s strategic word choices show that strong brand positioning can be just as much (if not more) about what you don’t say as what you do.

If you enjoyed this post or know someone who may find it interesting, please share it with them and encourage them to subscribe: brandchemistry.co/p/apple-banned-words

That’s it!