Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-05-10
Source: The Conversation – France (in French)– By Dominique Billon, Professor of Marketing, Kedge Business School
For thirty years, through the eyes of three generations – from my parents to my children – I have studied how Apple succeeded in becoming part of my family. The underlying idea: to understand how consumers appropriate the mythological narratives nourished by marketing teams and integrate them into their personal lives. Who better than their loved ones to talk about it? What lessons can marketing services of companies learn from this?
Impossible to escape it.Apple celebrates its 50 yearsaround the world in iconic places: Alicia Keys concert at the Apple Store in Grand Central in New York, Paul McCartney at the Apple Park in Cupertino (California), fashion show of Feng Chen Wang at the Apple Jing’an in Shanghai (China).
Symbol of the counter-culture, having become one of the three largest market capitalizations worldwide (more than4,000 billionof US dollars, or nearly 3,400 billion euros), the company has been nurturing over the years the story of alocated brand“at the crossroads of arts and technology”, around thepromise“Think Different ».
This is not a simple communication strategy but a perfect example of“brandingcultural. Brands recognized as cultural icons owe this not only to their products, but also to their ability to mobilize the major myths of their time, and then reinterpret them.
Apple does not only sell iPhones or Macs, but a mythological narrative, that of the creative individual who thinks differently in a world trapped in standardization. That’s why the “brandingcultural” can help us understand how individuals reappropriate these narratives in their daily lives.
Mythesisdocumented this phenomenon on a scale unusual for marketing research: thirty years of relationship between my own family and the brand, analyzed from the perspective ofConsumer Culture Theory. It is based on the combination of several types of data, such as life stories, family photographs, or artifacts collected from three generations.
Rites of passage
This thesis tells a story that marketing dashboards do not capture. Apple was not content to be bought by the family, it often entered them through the vector of the gift:
“At every birthday, or at Christmas, there has to be a bit of Apple… It’s another way of saying that we are a family,” emphasizes Valérie, my wife.
Goodies – T-shirts, pins, etc. – related to the different generations of iPod, iPhone, iPad, or Mac, giving and receiving Apple gifts is a ritual staged on the occasion of family events or rites of passage:
“Matthieu, my eldest son, has just passed his baccalaureate. His grandmother, my mother, and I are giving him a white MacBook. The item is magnificent… 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 purchased by the parents is then given to the grandparents, and subsequently to the grandchildren. Each of these exchanges is loaded with meanings that go far beyond the market value of the product:
“Her iPad represents her grandchildren, because it’s a way to communicate with them,” recalls my sister Virginie.
These family practices are transmitted over the long term, between generations and throughout phases of family restructuring.
Family brand
The brand has integrated into our daily interactions: FaceTiming the older brother to motivate the younger sisters to eat or organizing fun educational father-daughter activities. During this time “Dad, shall we play teacher, like at school?” with Carla, my younger 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 ubiquitous: “There is not an hour in the day when we don’t have an Apple product in our hands,” emphasizes Valérie, my wife.
Also to read:
Fifty years of Apple: eight key moments that changed our world
Apple nourishes family memory during systematic visits to Apple Stores on our family trips:
“What I like about the Apple Stores is that they create a real anchor point. It’s the only store that does that to me. I feel like I’m at home and it always reminds me of my father,” relates Matthieu, my eldest son.
The apple brand has become a“family brand”. Not a brand that the family buys, but a brand that contributes over the long term to the construction of the family identity. It provides family members with stories that they find convincing for their identity construction as individuals, but especially as a family.
“The computer is an instrument that allows the mind to take flight, it is the ULM of the mind,” he saidApple France CEO Jean-Louis Gassée.
Gradually, the brand comes to embody the continuity of the family bond, to express a relative form of family stability, to play the role of a symbolic balm that soothes tensions or identity uncertainties within a family group, evolving in a society described by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman as“liquid”, where nothing is lasting.
In return, Apple captures the “ethical surplus” generated by the emotions it evokes among consumers, according to the researcherAdam Arvidson. Brand loyalty is nurtured by the family bond that it helps to weave.
Key moments in people’s lives
What can marketing managers learn from these fifty years of the Apple saga? Perhaps an invitation to shift their perspective, to “think differently”?
Most companies seek to retain their customers with programs primarily oriented towards the company’s interests. The customer is more considered as a “financial asset” than as a person with interests, passions, skills, and problems. Many companies measure loyalty throughindicators centered on the companyÂ: redemption rate, rate ofchurn(or ofattrition), customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, etc.
These tools measure the breadth of the relationship. They say nothing about what happens in depth: the place the brand occupies in the practices, conversations, and key moments of people’s lives.
This research invites a cultural vision of the brand. Instead of “how many customers come back?”, let us ask ourselves the following questions: how do individuals integrate the brand into their uses, practices, and rituals? How does it promote rituals of sharing? How does it nurture stories that consumers appropriate? How does it fit into moments of generational transmission? What meaning does the brand take on in each person’s personal, familial, and socio-cultural world?
This comes down to questioning thelink valueof the brand: how does the brand help create connections with others?
Apple did not build fifty loyalty with loyalty programs or promotions. It earned this loyalty by proposing and updating a myth powerful enough that millions of people, in millions of families, take ownership of it and make it a part of their own story.
Dominique Billon does not work for, advise, own shares in, or receive funds from an organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than their research organization.
–ref. Happy birthday Apple! How the brand with the apple became a member of my family –https://theconversation.com/happy-birthday-apple-how-the-apple-brand-became-a-member-of-my-family-280521