The idea of consumer products as narrators is nothing new. It might one of the principle axioms of cultural criticism as informed by rhetorical theory — anything can be a text, all texts make arguments, and these arguments reveal value systems (Sellnow 5). Fisher further elaborates that arguments are most fully understood as narratives. The popular culture is therefore full of narratives, and their apprehension is not necessarily predicated on awareness of the narrative itself. Every day, in a variety of ways, popular culture successfully communicates arguments that its consumers cannot directly distinguish. The most important targets for criticism should follow from this notion and include artifacts with the most ubiquity and the highest degree of assimilation.
As of yet, little rhetorical scholarship has been devoted to the Apple brand as a cultural artifact, despite its growing satisfaction of these criteria. Clearly the brand aggressively promotes its narrative, which is mediated in a variety of ways — hundreds of static and video advertisements (some of which never appeared on television or in print, but are available via the internet); products with narrative elements embedded or implicit in their aesthetics; narrative implications to the brand's semiography as employed in packaging, web page design, retail outlet design, etc; narrative arguments in the company's public statements and corporate actions; narrative drawn by the progression of new products released, especially as these products amount to new technological tools (as opposed to upgrades or improvements upon older models).
Further, Apple is uniquely poised to create a narrative around itself because of the level of control it maintains over the consumer's end experience — Apple heavily regulates or in some cases dictates the very forms of its hardware (and the permissible and non-permissible functions or modifications to that hardware), the software that runs it (and the permissible and non-permissible functions or modifications to that software), the peripheral or third-party software that is allowed to make use of the product environment, the avenues by which a consumer may acquire content (creative or otherwise) for their product, the avenues by which content providers may reach Apple customers, and finally the types of content (creative or otherwise) a consumer may access with their Apple product.
What this control allows is remarkable consistency across the mediated texts that tell the Apple narrative. The variety of media also lends the narrative agility and adaptability to the changing circumstances of cultural exchange. Given this consistency and availability, it seems safe to assume that a number of the arguments the Apple narrative makes are now taken for granted by the consumers of these texts, as the culture seems to be missing a widely dispersed counter-narrative, or obvious signs that the narrative lacks probability or fidelity, or any of Burke's comic-frame responses. Indeed the popular criticism of Apple is narrowly oppositional, grounded in consumerism (and little else), and often gets subsumed by the Apple narrative it seeks to resist. Cultural criticism, then, seems well suited to critiquing what the average consumer is ill-equipped to do on her own.
Methodology is an important question, of course, and in the case of Apple it becomes a little complicated. Traditional narrative criticism is a powerful tool for unfolding the means by which a particular narrative makes its arguments, and what those arguments seem to value and devalue. It is less powerful outside the realm of pure description, however, because nothing prevents its conclusions from forming purely oppositional or rigidly rationalist responses to the text along preconceived value lines (e.g. Sellnow's Marxist reading of A Charlie Brown Christmas). This is precisely the sort of outcome that Burke seeks to avoid with perspective by incongruity, which by means also common to metaphor and poetics forces the consumer to make the new meanings that alter the narrative perspective.
Burke's method, however, is heavily dependent on linguistic critique (Levasseur), which has a more complicated application to the extra-linguistic and non-discursive forms of the Apple narrative. I will confine most of my criticism to the traditional approach, with the understanding that it remains incomplete until Burke's method can be applied, whether or not that takes a written form.
The easiest place to begin is with the series of ads Apple ran with the famous Mac and PC guy, because it features identifiable characters and tells a familiar story. Justin Long and John Hodgman stand in for a Mac and a PC, respectively, and talk and interact with each other along the stereotypical lines of difference between the two products. Dressed in a dull business suit and almost mawkishly awkward and stuffy, Hodgman not only represents the PC product, he is also meant to represent the "standard" user of these products. Long, on the other hand — attractive, slim, costumed as a creative professional (e.g. a designer) — is meant to represent the virtues of the Apple product line, as well as stand as a model for the "typical" Mac user. The company released dozens of these advertisements, each with a different conflict and intended to address a different aspect of the divide between Apple and PCs (read: Microsoft), and taken together they establish a relationship between the two. The general character of this relationship is benevolent Mac versus truculent PC, and the minor conflicts of the segments usually involve some examination of the generally superior competence of the Mac. Consequently, the PC is shown to be perpetually incompetent and incapable of the sort of normal tasks, the ads seem to argue, that an average consumer of the technology might want to perform. The ads also pit creative tasks against numbers-oriented, or left-brain analytical tasks, in a simplistic dichotomy very familiar to students of pop psychology.
An important point about this ad series is that it never demonstrates how the products in question correlate with the actors playing them. Negative and positive qualities, as well as the successes and failures of the characters in the narratives, are attributed to people in these ads, rather than pieces of technology. The effect of this is to collapse one paradigm that opponents of Apple have sometimes maintained, that of style versus substance. Because the narrative is defining characters rather than describing products, it is free to attribute both style and substance to one character and neither quality to the other, and indeed seems to argue that style is substance — the PC fails because it is socially awkward and unfashionable, whereas the Mac succeeds through grace and charisma. This is not an unfamiliar system of values to anyone who is familiar with, for example, Cinderella, with its ugly, domineering stepsisters and beautiful, downtrodden protagonist. Beauty is inherently good, ugliness is inherently evil.
Apple's collapsing of the distinction between image and performance continues beyond this ad series, as is demonstrated in the video advertisement for the release of the Mac Book Air. The extraordinarily thin, light, and sleek laptop emerges from an envelope to the tune of Yael Naim's "New Soul," which features first-person lyrics that heavily personify the product. On screen text proclaims the Mac Book Air to be the world's thinnest notebook, thereby assigning the responses to the attractive presentation and catchy tune to the notebook's "thinness". Translation — thin is beautiful, a perfectly familiar value to consumers of popular culture. Combined with the company's frequent anthropomorphization of its products, it is easy to see how this piece takes advantage of the "ideal" thin body image, and in doing so expands the reach of thin-mania.
Beyond the associations of thinness, beauty, and image, the Apple brand has also struggled to associate its products with racial diversity. The campaign that most seriously pushed this goal was the color silhouette series for the iPod, both in static and video forms, that featured distinct silhouettes of a wide variety of people, often identifiable by secondary racial characteristics, caught in a kind of colorful pop nirvana over their experience of the music on their iPod. Bold design made this campaign stand out, but it speaks more subtly to another aspect of the Apple narrative — Apple products are for everyone. They are colorful yet colorblind, ubiquitous, universally pleasing and easy to use, and more importantly, they are essential. Not having an iPod or iPhone or iPad makes it difficult to participate in the new cultural space, especially as it overlaps with the metaspace of cellular and wireless communication. Apple products are non-discursive signifiers for participation in popular culture, which by its very nature is populist.
The trouble with the association the brand makes here is that the products are not priced for popular consumption. By any measure of income or economic standard of definition, Apple products are in fact luxury goods, which puts the consumer at a disadvantage because of the pressure the narrative places upon them. One economic axiom of satisfaction is that people seek to match the income and consumptive levels of their peer groups, and that they feel pressure whenever the lag behind or exceed their peers in these areas. The Apple narrative insists that the products will associate consumers with their peers (regardless of whether or not their peers actually own an Apple product), so consumers are pressured to spend outside their income levels on the mistaken assumption that it is within bounds for their socioeconomic status. This phenomenon is not unique to Apple by any means, and can be seen in, for example, the high end athletic shoes pushed upon the African American market. Apple, however, is seeking a much wider audience, so its effects are farther-reaching.
These analyses address a minor portion of the much larger collection of media that sell the Apple narrative. They do not address, for example, the brand symbol itself and the narrative associations it has acquired. They do not address the narrative of the Apple retail experience. They do not address the ethical implications of the censorial control the company has begun to exercise over the content it makes available via its products (which lays bare some of the mechanisms the company uses to build the narrative). In terms of size and ubiquity, Apple is quickly beginning to reach a level that puts it in the same commercial league (though not historical) as Coca-Cola and McDonalds. It has the advantage over competitors like Microsoft and Google in that consumers not only associate it with a virtual experience (as with these companies), but also with a tactile experience that is extraordinarily well suited to reach a Maslow zenith of humanistic design. It has reached this level not simply because of clever business strategies and quality products and services, but because it has a keen eye for narrative and it actively works to maintain that narrative. Unfortunately, many of the value systems inherent to these narratives are troubling and could stand for further critique, or what Burke thought of as a correcting of their historical curve (Levasseur). The tools for this critique are all ready available, and as the narrative continues to grow, socially relevant rhetorical scholarship should play a greater role in their refinement.
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