Origination: The Geographies of Brands and Branding

Chapter Six‘Global’ Origination … Apple

Introduction

Scrutinizing its portrayal as a somehow placeless and ubiquitous ‘global’ brand, origination reveals how the meaning and value of Apple in the shifting spatial and temporal market contexts of the international technology business have been inescapably geographically associated in Silicon Valley, California, by the actors involved. The brand and its co-founder Steve Jobs originate from the particular geographical context of Cupertino, Santa Clara County, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley – christened ‘Computertino’ in the late 1970s (Moritz 2009: 288). The attributes of the geographical associations of Silicon Valley as innovative, radical, revolutionary and youthful (Moritz 2009; Walker and the Bay Area Study Group 1990) have been used to imbue the brand with a sense of ‘creativity, freedom of thought … Silicon Valley values that people associate with the place … sunny, optimistic, futuristic … gold rush … stick with rich associations … Apple embodies all these things and especially Jobs’ (Brand Web Site Editor and Publisher, author’s interview, 2013). As a constructed and to a degree fluid spatial entity, ‘Silicon Valley’ can be configured as a local, sub-regional or regional scale and it performs an integral role as a meaningful and valuable place in the origination of the Apple brand. Apple’s socio-spatial history demonstrates an origination at once relational and ‘global’ in its international reach and territorial ...