Introduction
Definition of Brand Wheel
A brand wheel is essential in enhancing a brand’s market performance. This is because it encompasses crucial aspects, including the brand’s emotional and relational benefits, values, and essence, as well as the empowerment of people, respect for individuals, innovativeness, authority, and integrity. Such aspects form the basis upon which a brand like Apple thrives.
The brand’s success is based on its innovative culture, and the brand wheel represents its market positioning. The key features, benefits, values, personality, and rewards of the brand will be presented in the discussion. Additionally, the necessary aspects of the brand wheel that need to be changed, as well as the brand wheel’s outlook in five years, will be highlighted.
Apple Inc.’s Background
Apple Inc. is among the world’s richest technology companies, holding a 70% market share. Founded in 1976 to manufacture personal computers, it has diversified its revenue by leveraging personal phones, investing in cybersecurity, and developing various technological software. The company is worth more than 977 billion with a prospect of diversified growth (Ghiasabadi Farahani et al., 2021).
The company has managed to establish itself as one of the most recognized brands, despite stiff competition from IBM, Samsung, and other major phone and computer companies. Compared with other companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, the brand has been ranked the most valuable company in the world. With such an established brand, the company’s focus on consumers is highly expected branding.
Apple’s Brand Wheel
A brand essence is crucial in conveying customers’ perceptions of the brand and how the company presents itself externally. The first constituent of the essence is the attributes, where in this case, Apple has attributes such as creativity, secrecy, and innovation.
Secondly, its consumer values, which include customer and locational excellence, strengthened its secrecy attribute, making it exceptional in the market (Ghiasabadi Farahani et al., 2021). The company’s personality is centered on imagination, hopes, and dreams, enabling customers to experience cutting-edge technology. Besides, one of the benefits that Apple product users enjoy is esteem and prestige, as the company is associated with luxury. Lastly, the company’s quality speaks for itself, as it introduced materials such as tungsten to the phone industry, which increases product durability compared to others. Figure 1 simplifies the brand essence wheel.
Attributes
The five rims of the framework contain the brand’s wheel features. The outer rim encompasses the brand’s surface-level aspects, providing potential customers with the high-level information needed to make informed decisions. Another feature of the brand wheel is the benefits that the brand accrues to its customers, which comprise the relational and emotional benefits of the Apple brand (Hanssens & Pauwels, 2016).
The other features are the brand values and the brand personality. In this case, the values constitute the company’s beliefs, which form the basis of the organizational culture (Ghiasabadi Farahani et al., 2021). On the other hand, the brand personality entails the human aspects of a brand. A brand’s personality is the most crucial thing in appealing to the customers’ emotions.
Values
The values of Apple include making quality products. The other value is making the processes simple for the clientele, including the use of its products. The company believes in owning the innovations and technology in producing its products through patent rights and copyright protections (Hanssens & Pauwels, 2016).
The other value is investing in viable markets and launching prudent projects. Additionally, the company believes in group collaboration and interactions to enhance innovation (Ghiasabadi Farahani et al., 2021). Additionally, the company believes in excellence and consistently pursues perfection. The company’s other crucial value is its constant focus on innovation.
Personality
The personality of Apple encompasses the brand’s attributes that endear it to the customers. Some attributes of the brand personality include lifestyle, innovation, passion, and dreams. Additionally, the aspirations and power of the people, facilitated by technology, are among the brand’s key personality attributes.
The company endears itself to the people due to its unmatched technology. For this reason, such innovativeness captures people’s imagination; hence, it aligns the people’s expectations with reality (Ghiasabadi Farahani et al., 2021). Many people find the experience of Apple’s high-tech innovation fulfilling. Besides, its simplicity in innovation makes it a perfect brand for the world.
Another crucial aspect that defines the brand’s personality is the freedom to innovate, where employees are given the leeway to be innovative in their tasks (Keiningham et al., 2007). Such liberty fosters stellar performances and novel innovations from employees, boosting their morale to innovate more for self-fulfillment and helping the company achieve its innovation goals.
Benefits
The brand wheel contains the brand’s relational and emotional benefits in the outer ring. The relational benefits include systems integration, improved operational effectiveness, enhanced individual performance, valuable data and technology, time and cost savings, tailored services, and rapid response (Ghiasabadi Farahani et al., 2021). In contrast, the emotional benefits include trusted partnerships, security, total confidence, best practice, added value, straightforwardness, peace of mind, and corporate risk reduction.
Key Reward
Apple’s key reward is brand loyalty, which sustains the brand. Brand loyalty manifests in the happiness of its employees, resulting in lower employee turnover. Additionally, constant innovation is another manifestation of brand loyalty, as retained expert employees maintain high standards of innovation that continually improve the company (Daikuzono et al., 2019).
Consequently, customer satisfaction and the traction of new customers occur. Customers are consistently satisfied with the customization of their products, as long as they meet their specifications (Keiningham et al., 2007). Additionally, the company fosters a favorable environment for its employees, which in turn leads to employee loyalty and associated benefits, such as constant innovation.
Brand Wheel Change
While Apple might be doing reasonably well in the market, the brand still needs to change. Firstly, the company should enhance its attributes, such as creativity and innovation, by introducing new products with distinct features. People cannot easily distinguish between iPhone 11, 12, and 13 Pro Max as they all have three cameras (Daikuzono et al., 2019). Besides, the company should focus on brand benefits, such as energy savings, rather than luxury, as most of its iPhones have shorter battery life. Apart from attributes and benefits, Figure 2 illustrates the order of importance for the changes Apple should make.
The aspects that should be changed in Apple’s wheel features include the brand identity. Its innovation, difference, and simplicity characterize the current brand essence for Apple. The brand essence needs to shift to focus on continuous improvement and simplicity, thereby enhancing the connection between the relational and emotional benefits of the brand and the values it represents.
The change of brand essence will streamline the alignment of the brand’s benefits to the people and the company’s values (Daikuzono et al., 2019). For instance, the company values include owning its innovations, producing high-quality products, delivering exceptional services, and engaging in cost-effective projects to enhance profitability. However, other features ought to remain the same.
Benefits
Some emotional benefits need to be adjusted to provide a more positive perspective of the Apple brand. For instance, corporate risk reduction needs to change, given that the company is willing to take risks. The company takes serious risks in the innovations it creates. Such risks create rewards for the company, including brand loyalty and customer satisfaction, while empowering employees to undertake innovative ventures (Daikuzono et al., 2019).
The fact that the company prioritizes innovation above everything else to achieve customer satisfaction and loyalty means that corporate risk should not form part of the company’s emotional benefits in the brand wheel. However, all the other emotional and relational benefits underscored above should be maintained to enhance the company’s sustenance.
Key Reward
Employee happiness and customer satisfaction are key reward aspects that need to be changed. The reason is that employees may be overworked in an effort to fulfill customers’ dreams, potentially at the detriment of their own health. However, the other aspects of the brand’s key reward, including innovation, customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and employee retention, should be maintained (Daikuzono et al., 2019). These factors should be maintained because they constitute the brand’s rewards for innovation, employee empowerment, and continuous improvement, enabling the production of high-quality products with cutting-edge technology.
Personality
The aspects of brand personality need to include the lifestyle aspect of the brand wheel. In this case, Apple employees are often given strict deadlines to meet when innovating, which puts them under considerable pressure. For instance, employees may be overworked; such a lifestyle is detrimental to their health. Such a component of personality needs to be adjusted to ensure employees a balance between work and life (Daikuzono et al., 2019). However, all other aspects of brand personality should be maintained, including innovation, passion, dreams, simplicity, and the discretionary powers given to employees to accomplish tasks.
Values
The company’s values, including investing in viable markets, need to be revised. Such a value should be changed to allow the company to be radical in its marketing activities. The motive is that selectiveness in marketing limits the company’s ability to test new markets that could prove viable (Daikuzono et al., 2019). However, all other values, including ownership of innovation, focus on excellence, simplicity, and quality products, should be maintained to maintain the brand’s high performance in the market.
Future Outlook
In five years, Apple’s brand wheel will likely be different, reflecting changes in the brand’s features, personality, values, and benefits. The transition to the new brand wheel within five years will be based on these changes and will enhance the company’s performance beyond its current market performance. For instance, adjusting its brand essence will enhance the company’s performance, given the focus on continuous improvement and simplicity (Zhang et al., 2020). The aspect of simplicity will enhance the use of the company’s products by virtually everyone; hence, the brand will be non-discriminatory. For this reason, the company will promote communalism rather than individualism.
Marketing Strategy
Product
Adopting quality in the production of Apple products will enhance the achievement of the new brand wheel. Additionally, the focus on quality will align the customer specifications with the production, ensuring seamless customer loyalty. Adopting a cost-benefit analysis in production will enhance profitability while producing high-quality products for customers (Amron, 2018). Adopting innovation in these products will be one way to ensure product quality and customer satisfaction.
Price
The price strategy that will be adopted is value-based pricing. In this case, the company will adopt a pricing strategy that aligns with the innovation invested in producing the product. The brand is known for its innovation rather than low pricing; hence, the strategy will be ideal for the new brand wheel. Additionally, the recognition of the product’s value makes the company more competitive, as it shifts the clientele’s focus from high prices to the quality of the product (Anggraini, 2018). Generally, the brand’s reputation is considered in the value-based pricing approach.
People
Customer service is the most critical aspect of any successful brand. For this reason, the marketing team’s quality must be considered, given that the sales team’s approach determines whether sales are made. The people strategy that will be adopted to reflect the new brand wheel is marketing the product to the millennial population, that is so much into product quality and innovation that a product represents (Anggraini, 2018). In this case, such a target market will benefit the company in terms of sales and customer loyalty. Additionally, adjusting production to align with the tastes and preferences of these generations will enhance the company’s achievement of its goals.
Promotion
Promoting Apple products should be strategic and innovative in order to enhance awareness across multiple market segments. Exploring market niches that have not been explored before will be a highly effective promotional strategy (Wang et al., 2018). Additionally, utilizing social media promotion sites is one effective way to reach a broad population within a short time (Wang et al., 2018). Moreover, the use of social media will yield satisfactory results, given that information flows quickly, as social media users interact with friends and inform them about such advertisements.
Place
The company must adopt both offline physical locations and online stores to achieve its objectives. Adopting a sub-strategy will be ideal for covering potential online and offline customers. Displaying the products in online and offline stores will give the company greater options for generating revenue and super-profits (Amron, 2018). Additionally, online customers could purchase the product online and be directed to collect it at online stores for their convenience. Such an operation will boost the company’s sales, reflecting the advantage of the new brand wheel.
Conclusion
The brand wheel is a crucial marketing tool. The discussion clearly shows that Apple’s brand wheel reflects the company’s basics in marketing and operations. Besides, the brand wheel highlights the brand’s organizational culture of innovativeness. The changes necessary in the various aspects of the brand wheel, including features, benefits, brand personality, key rewards, and values, underscore the dynamic nature of a brand’s journey to success.
The company must adjust to various market changes to remain competitive and responsive to customers’ tastes and preferences. The sub-strategies in pricing, product, and promotion underscore the brand wheel’s role in determining the brand’s performance level in the market. Adopting value-based pricing aligns with the company’s focus on innovation and producing high-quality products.
References
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