Although I am an avid apple fan and am slowly becoming a pure Apple user in term s of lifestyle gadget, for me,

there has always been one sacred cow that Apple h as never been able to penetrate. That of the mobile phone domain. For me I am a Nokia loyalist. Having made the mistake of following a trend and switching to So ny Ericson, I can now happily say that I am back with Nokia and have never been happier. The concept of smart phones for me have always had an impending doom element att ached to it. Getting a smart phone meant saying goodbye to my freedom; of being chained to the gadget 24-7 while slowly morphing into one of those creatures tha t have it as an extension of their arm, constantly checking their emails and suf fering from an acute withdrawal symptom should it be silent for more than a minu te. As it is, I am already experiencing a slightly obsessive relationship with m y facebook page to a degree that is quite unsettling; I feel compelled to check if someone has responded to my postings and slightly put out when there are no r ed flags on the top left hand corner. Anyway I am digressing. Suffice to say I e quate all these 3rd screen gadgets as an igniter of an obsessive dna coding in m e that should be kept dormant forever. So when the iPhone came out I was intrigued but apprehensive and the touch scree n keyboard was a concept that frustrated the hell out of me with constant spelli ng errors due to the proximity of each key. I was sure that I would be one of th e few that would be iPhone free. So I settled instead for an iPod Touch which I have grown to love and which has cleverly got me adjusted to the touch screen fo rmat. This is what I call clever marketing, if one product does not work, offer the customer a less intimidating model in terms of price and usability and then slowly up-sell the customer to a higher end variant/model. When I saw all the ballyhoo created by iPhone 4 users, I felt slightly vindicate d at my choice of being iPhone free. That is until I watched Steve in a press co nference addressing the problems that have been raised by some iPhone 4 users. T hat press conference was one of the most effective tools of branding that I have ever witness short of Obama s presidential campaign in 2009. You can say that it wa s a triumph of the Apple PR machinery but really it boils down to delivery and S teve is a master communicator that all CEOs should learn from. His delivery was clear concise and the most compelling of all, passionate. The k ey message that I kept getting out of it was - If our customers are not happy, we re no t happy and then he spends the next 15 minutes or so telling the press what Apple w as doing fix this problem and make their customers happy. So simple yet so effec tive. At that moment the Apple brand did not merely stand for Think Different, i t was Think Different to Make our Customers Happy. A simple but heartfelt promis e that cuts to the core and looking at the queues outside Apple stores on the da y of the launch of both the iPad and iPhone 4, it is a promise that is not only delivered but has built an army of ardent, even cultish devotees. And happy is r eally what it constantly delivers. Yesterday, I saw a 46 year old man whose prev ious phone was the most basic Nokia model, becoming childlike in his exploration of his new iPhone 4 and the Apps it contained. His eyes lit up with delight pla ying with the fingerprint scan and he would roar with laughter every time he got a call from his fake friend. There are those who are so happy that they wrote a song to defend the iPhone 4 and posted it on Youtube. Happy as a promise has made Apple into an invincible brand. It is the biggest mu sic company in the world and on the 26th of May 2010, Apple became the largest c ompany in the tech universe and the second largest in the US behind Exxon Mobil. (source: Apple Nation by Farhad Manjoo, Fast Company, July/August 2010.). Apple s bran d is so powerful that for some people it s just like a true religion (Martin Lindstorm, Apple Nation by Farhad Manjoo, Fast Company July/August 2010). So I guess I can safely say that happy sells. Towards the end of his talk, he seemed to wane and I immediately began to worry about his health. Suddenly I could not imagine a future without Steve and hoped that whatever was ailing him post liver transplant, was only a temporary afflict ion. But more importantly, at the end of that 20 min press conference, he had tu rned me from a fan to an ardent believer of brand Steve and brand Apple. You can

be sure that when the iPhone 4 rolls onto our shores that I will happily part w ith my money to get a bigger slice of happy. That for me is the pure power of br anding.