It’s scary when you think about how much brands dominate our lives.
We’d sooner forget the faces of distant friends and family than fail to recognise the golden arches of McDonald’s M, or the curving letters of Coca Cola.
Let’s face it – brands are pervasive. We see them on telly, on the internet and on the sides of buildings. They want us to see them more often than our best friends – in fact, they want to be our friends. So it’s kind of funny when their messages get undermined.
The Apple logo is up there with the most widely known brands around. But here’s what happens when people hijack it for their own purposes…
Tagline Truths
Appearance Costs, courtesy of Viktor Hertz
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Designer Viktor Hertz tells it like it is. Which is why his own mock-up of the Apple logo replaces the tagline ‘Think Different’ with one a little closer to the truth… In our humble opinion, he could have added a couple of words: ‘a lot’.
Bad Apple
Some Chinese retailers are such big fans of Apple they never even thought of mocking its logo. Instead, they faked entire Apple stores selling genuine Apple hardware. Probably worse, we’d expect. Apparently the fraudulent retailers were so convincing that some staff members even thought they were working for the American tech giant.
As of summer 2013, reports that more fake stores were opening in the country were still coming in, despite a government crackdown.
Mickey (Mouse) take
Courtesy of Viktor Hertz
Designer Viktor Hertz makes our list again with another parody of the Apple logo. There’s a few on his Flickr page but we’ve taken a fancy to this Disney one: it makes you think not only how similar branding can be, but how similar its purposes are: the apple and the mouse logos instantly bring to mind Apple and Disney.
Steve
After Apple founder Steve Jobs’ death in 2011, a Hong Kong student paid tribute to the visionary responsible for the iPod, iPhone and Mac with a cleverly altered logo featuring Jobs’ profile instead of the bite mark in the apple.
The touching image went viral after appearing on Twitter, inadvertently speaking volumes about the power of digital advertising.
Fruity logos
Grand Theft Auto V’s release last year was accompanied by advertising as prevalent as that heralding the release of the latest iPhone. So it was probably quite fitting that the game’s artists created a parody of the logo that proved quite a bit, er, fruitier, than Apple’s.
The image featured two oranges and a banana arranged suggestively inside a fruit bowl, on the back of an iPhone held by a bikini-clad woman.
