Overview
The psychological power of branding has been well-studied, and not just by academic universities. Companies have an enormous incentive to maximize the emotional pull of their products in order to increase sales.
One interesting and often talked-about brand is Apple. Apple's sleek and elegant product designs have created a distinct identity of innovation and sophistication for the brand that users find appealing, so much so, in fact, that they’ll pay top-dollar for Apple’s products.
But does this sophistication spill over to the users themselves? The competition between Apple devices and other tech brands has long been a topic of interest. However, few studies have tested whether the products themselves actually imbue the user with positive identity traits that others perceive.
In this experiment, we aimed to discover whether simply using an Apple product, in this case a MacBook laptop, could make the user appear more sophisticated to others.
The Experiment
We conducted a survey experiment with 401 people from Amazon Mechanical Turk in which participants were shown an image of a MacBook or Lenovo laptop, then asked to rate the sophistication of its hypothetical user.
Each participant was instructed as follows. “Imagine you work in an office and a new co-worker just arrived, sat down at her desk, and took out the [Mac / Lenovo] laptop pictured below.” Participants were then shown one of the two images below, randomly assigned.
After viewing the image and instructions, participants were asked a survey question that enabled us to measure our outcome of interest, perceived sophistication. Participants were asked, “How sophisticated does this person seem to you? (1 = Not at all, 7 = Extremely)” using a 1-7 scale.
Additionally, we asked whether participants regularly used an Apple computer or laptop to explore whether any positive effect on sophistication ratings might be limited to real Mac users.
Additionally, we asked whether participants regularly used an Apple computer or laptop to explore whether any positive effect on sophistication ratings might be limited to real Mac users.
Results
Statistical analyses revealed that the user of Apple’s MacBook was perceived to be slightly more sophisticated (avg. = 5.11) than our hypothetical Lenovo user (avg. = 4.79), an increase of about 6.5% (p = 0.012). Although this difference is statistically significant, the effect size is rather small, approximately a quarter of a standard deviation. Nevertheless, there was indeed an Apple sophistication effect.
Interestingly, even though 40% of our sample was comprised of Mac users, we found no significant difference in the results when considering whether each participant was a Mac user or non-Mac user (p = 0.380).
Conclusion
The findings indicate that there is indeed a slight boost in perceived sophistication for those using Apple products, specifically MacBook laptops. Interestingly, this outcome differs from our previous experiment on text message bubbles (iPhone vs. Android), where we found no difference in the likability of a text message sender when their text bubbles were blue vs. green. It would be intriguing to investigate how such effects vary for other brands and different social perceptions.
Methods Note
To test for significant differences in sophistication perceptions between our MacBook and Lenovo conditions, we used an independent samples t-test. A small p-value (less than 0.05) indicates a statistically significant difference. OLS regression analyses were used to test for significant interactions between the main results and participant demographics (e.g., real-life mac users vs. non-mac users). The data and survey materials used for this experiment are available upon request.