Seems everyone else on the web has chimed in on Apple’s “Misunderstood” campaign. Now that the dust has settled, I suppose it’s my turn.
It’s a polarizing example among viewers and marketers alike. Some get emotional and love the moral they read between the frames, others get frustrated by the clear holes in the story and a theme they think sends the wrong message.
My takeaway is simply this: both are right. Now let’s overanalyze it.
Cheating
The emotional side of the story heavily depends on us assuming the boy was NOT filming and thus missing Christmas. This is a critical piece.
If we don’t come to this conclusion, there’s no surprise that helps get the message through our emotional armor.
But filming with a phone is a fairly obvious activity. To do this the creators had to massage the details. So the boy always held the phone upright and sat alone more often than was family even if the video he created didn’t match. From my studies of stories, massaged details like this is sometimes called “cheating”.
Both Are Right
Notice that I said “moral they read” and “wrong message” in the first paragraph. Both are subjective and depend heavily on your view of technology and life-stage.
Apple knew that. And, so knowing, I believe they also knew different people would view this video very differently.
Because if the twist matched the viewer’s personal views, those “warm fuzzies” arrived. If they didn’t, the warm fuzzies were non-existant.
That, to me, is the critical piece.
The Power of Warm and Fuzzies
Just like a current girlfriend is perfect and your ex-girlfriend (who dumped you) is anything but, positive feelings about someone/something help us see past imperfections.
The same thing happened with this ad. If the emotion came, imperfections were either not noticed or easily overlooked. If the emotion didn’t come, the imperfections stood out like a sore thumb. If there are no imperfections, however, there may be no negative reaction either.
Moral of the story: massaging details in marketing stories isn’t a death sentence, but you’ve also just given something for non-emotion-feelers to negatively latch onto…for better or worse.
About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010
with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider
Inntopia,
my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley,
and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.
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