Over thirty years, through the eyes of three generations — from my parents to my children — I studied how Apple managed to become part of my family. The underlying idea: to understand how consumers appropriate the mythological narratives crafted by marketing teams and weave them into their personal lives. Who better than one’s own loved ones to speak to this? And what lessons can corporate marketing departments draw from it?
There is no escaping it. Apple is celebrating its 50th anniversary around the world in iconic venues: an Alicia Keys concert at the Apple Store in Grand Central, New York; Paul McCartney performing at Apple Park in Cupertino, California; a Feng Chen Wang fashion show at Apple Jing’an in Shanghai, China.
Once a symbol of counterculture, Apple has become one of the three largest market capitalizations in the world (over $4 trillion, or nearly €3.4 trillion). Over the years, the company has nurtured the narrative of a brand positioned “at the crossroads of arts and technology,” built around the promise of “Think Different.”
This is not merely a communication strategy but a perfect example of “cultural branding.” Brands recognized as cultural icons owe their status not only to their products, but to their ability to mobilize the great myths of their era and then reinterpret them.
Apple does not merely sell iPhones or Macs, but a mythological narrative: that of the creative individual who thinks differently in a world locked into standardization. This is why “cultural branding” can help us understand how individuals appropriate these narratives in their everyday lives.
My doctoral thesis documented this phenomenon at an unusual scale for marketing research: thirty years of relationship between my own family and the brand, analyzed through the lens of Consumer Culture Theory. It is grounded in the intersection of several types of data, including life narratives, family photographs, and artifacts collected from three generations.
Rites of Passage
The thesis tells a story that marketing dashboards fail to capture. Apple did not merely get purchased by the family — it entered it, often through the medium of the gift:
“At every birthday, or at Christmas, there has to be a little bit of Apple… It’s another way of saying we are a family,” says Valérie, my wife.
From branded merchandise — T-shirts, pins, and so on — to successive generations of iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Macs, giving and receiving Apple gifts is a ritual staged during family events that becomes a rite of passage:
“Matthieu, my eldest son, has just passed his baccalauréat. His grandmother – my mother – and I, give him a white MacBook. The object is beautiful… We want to celebrate his success and mark his entry into business school.”
These objects circulate among family members, passing from parents to children, and sometimes from children to parents. The “old” iPhone model bought by the parents is later given to the grandparents, and then to the grandchildren. Each of these exchanges is laden with meanings that far exceed the product’s market value:
“His iPad represents his grandchildren, because it is a way of communicating with them,” recalls my sister Virginie.
These family practices are transmitted across time, between generations, and through the various phases of family recomposition.
A Family Brand
The brand has woven itself into our daily interactions: calling the eldest brother via FaceTime to encourage the younger sisters to eat, or organizing fun and educational father-daughter activities. During those “Daddy, can we play teacher, like at school?” sessions with Carla, my youngest daughter, I would gather a dictionary, paper, pencils, and an iPad to discover new words or write stories on rainy Saturdays.
The brand’s products are omnipresent: “There isn’t an hour in a day when we don’t have an Apple product in our hands,” says Valérie, my wife.
Apple nurtures family memory through systematic visits to Apple Stores during our family trips:
“What I love about Apple Stores is that they create a genuine anchor point. It’s the only store that does that for me. I feel at home, and it always reminds me of my father,” says Matthieu, my eldest son.
Apple has become a “family brand” — not a brand that the family buys, but a brand that participates, over the long term, in the construction of family identity. It feeds family members with narratives they find compelling for their own identity construction as individuals, and above all as a family.
“The computer is an instrument that allows the mind to take flight — it is the ultralight aircraft of the mind,” said Jean-Louis Gassée, former general manager of Apple France.
Gradually, the brand comes to embody the continuity of family bonds, to express a relative form of family stability, to play the role of a symbolic balm that soothes tensions and identity uncertainties within a family group navigating a society described by sociologist Zygmunt Bauman as “liquid” — where nothing is permanent.
In return, Apple captures the “ethical surplus” produced by the affective bonds it generates among consumers, according to researcher Adam Arvidsson. Brand loyalty is nourished by the family ties it helps to weave.
Key Moments in People’s Lives
What lessons can marketing managers draw from fifty years of the Apple saga? Perhaps an invitation to shift their perspective — to “think differently.”
Most companies seek to build customer loyalty through programs oriented primarily toward the company’s own interests. The customer is treated more as a “financial asset” than as a person with interests, passions, skills, and problems. Many companies measure loyalty through company-centric indicators: repurchase rate, churn rate (or attrition), customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, and so on.
These tools measure the surface of the relationship. They say nothing about what happens in depth: the place the brand occupies in people’s practices, conversations, and key life moments.
This research invites a cultural vision of the brand. Instead of asking “how many customers come back?”, let us ask: How do individuals incorporate the brand into their uses, practices, and rituals? How does it encourage sharing rituals? How does it feed narratives that consumers appropriate? How does it figure into moments of intergenerational transmission? What meaning does the brand take on in each person’s personal, family, and socio-cultural world?
This amounts to questioning the brand’s “linking value”: how does the brand help to create bonds with others?
Apple did not build fifty years of loyalty through loyalty programs or promotions. It earned that loyalty by proposing and continually renewing a myth powerful enough for millions of people, in millions of families, to appropriate it and make it a piece of their own story.
Read it in french on The Conversation