A comprehensive brand strategy for Apple App Store, developed ahead of the store’s relaunch in 2017 as a foundational guide and ‘operations manual’ for building and maintaining a cohesive brand identity.
Background
Since its launch in 2008 with an initial offering of just 500 available apps the Apple App Store had experienced unprecedented, organic growth. By 2016 the number of apps available to download had grown to over 2m, with the marketplace generating more than $28b in revenue.
Remarkably, this growth had been enjoyed despite there being a formally-defined brand identity or strategy in place. To address this, SYPartners worked with App Store’s marketing leaders to develop an actionable brand strategy that would bring clarity and unity to the business.
Through a series of stakeholder interviews, customer focus groups, and several ideation workshops, we developed a comprehensive brand framework that would not only provide clarity, but act as a cultural touchpaper to help propel the App Store into its next stage of growth.
The examples below outline and illustrate the core elements of the strategy.
Insights
As a preliminary step, and to better understand incumbent brand perception, we met with Apple employees, app developers, and end-consumers across the globe. The synthesized learnings revealed a number of addressable issues and key opportunities for improvement.
Mission
A foundational mission statement was drafted to articulate a purpose-driven goal. This overarching, non-customer-facing objective formed a baseline for the work and enabled the organization to align around its fundamental direction and focus.
Core Idea
The story that expresses the App Store’s core value proposition, helping to articulate its brand promise and shape its key messaging themes.
Aspirational, urgent, and provocative, the narrative aims to capture the brand’s essence, describing vividly what makes it distinct and the unique role it plays in the world.
Beliefs
A set of belief statements define the organizational philosophy and its core values. They exist as an ethical framework and provide guiding principles for decision-making and operating standards.
Behaviors
Stemming from the ‘Beliefs’ were a collaboratively created set of behavioral guidelines to help shape the internal culture and code of conduct for team members. These ‘Behaviors’ ultimately inform the App Store’s customer-first approach and guide interactions across all touchpoints.
Personality
‘Personality’ serves as the blueprint for the brand’s public-facing identity and provides guidance for marketers, writers, and designers. It defines the tone and voice in written content and the essential elements that form its visual identity.
To complement these summarized recommendations we also crafted a set of comprehensive executional guidelines for writers and content creators, and a visual brand toolkit to bring consistency across multiple media channels.
Community
This section outlines a customer engagement strategy and recommends a variety of ways to celebrate the many diverse communities supported by the App Store — and boost engagement.
It details the characteristics and behaviors of key audience segments, profiles target customer archetypes, and proposes different strategies to stimulate deeper and richer connections.
Experiences
The final element of the brand strategy is devoted to product and user experience. It features a series of imagined concepts and executions, created not just as ideations for possible go-to-market ideas, but also to provide illustrative examples for how the constituent elements of the strategy come together in execution.
Also included are a series of provocations, observations, and though-starter questions to help orient the team. And importantly, provide a useful jumping off point as the organization collectively begin to operationalize the strategy.