The fun kids over at Tech Soup told me they ran an experiment to see if it’s true that Apple’s logo makes people more creative. Looks pretty convincing to me.
Get this: just looking at the Apple logo makes you more creative.
No joke. Even brief exposure to certain brands makes people mimic that brand’s “identity.” The researchers:
…conducted an experiment in which 341 university students completed what they believed was a visual acuity task, during which either the Apple or IBM logo was flashed so quickly that they were unaware they had been exposed to the brand logo. The participants then completed a task designed to evaluate how creative they were, listing all of the uses for a brick that they could imagine beyond building a wall.
People who were exposed to the Apple logo generated significantly more unusual uses for the brick compared with those who were primed with the IBM logo, the researchers said. In addition, the unusual uses the Apple-primed participants generated were rated as more creative by independent judges.
Imagine that. But does this mean staring at the Microsoft logo makes me greedy, monopolistic, and prone to screaming fits?