It’s not what you do or say that people remember.
It’s how you make them feel.
That’s why your corporate culture is such an incredibly powerful medium. Make your prospects, your clients, your interviewees, anyone outside your organization, really experience your culture.
In the long run, your culture is a lot more profitable than your product or your service. People actually waited in line for an iPhone 3G. Not a single one of them waited in line without being injected with the Apple culture, which was utilized to hype the release of a second-gen, not-much-better-than-the-last-one product.
True. When you make someone feel good, or bad, they remember what you did or said in the context of echo of that feeling. We come into contact every day with many of people and there’s yet we remember those contacts that were neutral - - because they did not impact our status quo.
Apply this concept to a brand and what you are saying, it seems to me, is that that company’s culture - - as expressed in it’s outward-facing manifestation - - “hits us” us well or badly because of how it makes us feel - - and so we identify strongly with a positive feeling and are repelled by a negative one. If we feel the same way about brand A, B, and C and have no preference, then if follows that none of them have made us feel good or bad and, therefore, have made no left no resonating impression at all.
But in Apple’s case, one can’t help but wonder why, in spite of the product not being all that much better than the previous version, and having had to stand in line so long: what it is about their culture that led you to purchase? What or how DOES Apple or the iPhone experience make you feel?