What two very different companies reveal about usefulness, identity, belonging, and the relationships people develop with brands.
By Choong Whan Park USC
As a California-based marketing scholar and author, I have focused much of my work on brand strategy, consumer psychology, and the relationships people develop with brands. When choosing companies to explore through these ideas, I look for examples that make an important distinction easier to understand. Apple and Starbucks interest me because both allow us to examine how a purchase can become part of something larger in a consumer’s life, although they reach that point in quite different ways.
Apple offers a way to examine how technology becomes connected with personal capability, creative work, and accumulated experience. Starbucks brings a different question into view: how does a business built around an everyday product become associated with a place, an occasion, or a familiar routine? Studying them together helps separate the product a company sells from the broader value a customer may experience.
I also chose them because neither case is straightforward. Their strengths create expectations that can be difficult to maintain. The same decisions that make a business more convenient, accessible, or efficient may change something customers have come to value. That tension makes these cases more useful than a simple account of how two recognizable companies became successful.
What I Look for in a Brand Case Study
A good case study should help us think more carefully, not merely give us a successful company to admire. Beginning with the assumption that everything a large brand does must be correct makes it too easy to confuse commercial outcomes with explanations. I am more interested in identifying a mechanism: what connects the company’s decisions with the meaning customers take from them?
One foundation for this approach is the research on strategic brand concept management that I developed with Bernard Jaworski and Deborah MacInnis. That work distinguished functional, experiential, and symbolic brand concepts and considered how an intended concept should guide brand management over time. It encouraged us to look beyond individual messages toward the relationship between what a brand is intended to represent and how it is presented to consumers.
For these case studies, I use that framework to ask different questions about the same offering. What does it help a person accomplish? What is the experience of using it? What, if anything, does it come to represent about the person choosing it? Apple and Starbucks make those questions accessible without requiring us to assume that every customer answers them in the same way.
Why Apple Makes the Relationship Beyond the Product Visible
I chose Apple because it encourages us to look beyond the individual device. Apple’s Continuity features connect activities across compatible products: customers can transfer material through AirDrop, move supported tasks between devices with Handoff, or use an iPhone as a camera for a Mac. The functional proposition therefore includes the relationship among products, not only the capabilities of each one.
For brand analysis, that raises an interesting possibility. A customer may initially evaluate a computer as a purchase with particular specifications. Later, the relevant unit of comparison may be a working environment that includes several devices, familiar applications, and established routines. A competitor is then competing with more than a piece of hardware. It is competing with a way the customer has learned to accomplish things.
Consider a photographer who uses a particular combination of devices while developing a portfolio. The equipment may initially be chosen for practical reasons. As the photographer gains experience, completes projects, and develops confidence, those tools may become associated with that progress. This is an illustrative possibility rather than a claim about every Apple customer, but it shows why product usefulness and personal meaning need not be separate.
There is an important caution here. Attachment to photographs, completed work, or a particular device is not automatically attachment to Apple as a brand. Someone might care deeply about their creative history while remaining quite willing to move it to another platform. That distinction is precisely why I find Apple useful: the case invites us to investigate where the customer’s connection actually resides rather than assuming that everything valuable inside an ecosystem belongs psychologically to the corporate brand.
Apple Also Makes It Necessary to Distinguish Attachment From Convenience
In research with my coauthors, I have examined the distinction between brand attachment and brand attitude strength. Our 2010 study differentiated the two constructs and investigated their value in explaining purchasing and consumers’ willingness to devote resources to a brand. The practical implication is that a favorable evaluation does not tell us everything about the relationship behind it.
Applied to Apple, I would want to understand why a customer chooses another product from the same company. Perhaps it offers the best practical fit. Perhaps familiarity reduces the effort of learning something new. Perhaps changing systems would be inconvenient. A connection with identity or personally important experiences is another possibility, but it should not be assumed simply because a purchase has been repeated.
These explanations can coexist. A customer may genuinely appreciate the brand and also face switching costs. The useful task is not to force that customer into one category, but to understand the contribution of each factor. This gives us a more realistic view of loyalty than treating every repeat purchase as evidence of affection.
That is the central reason for the emphasis in the Apple case study on experience, identity, and connected value. I wanted the analysis to explore how a relationship can deepen while remaining attentive to alternative explanations for why customers stay.
Why Starbucks Reveals Something Different
Starbucks interests me because the setting can become part of what the customer is choosing. The company’s own historical account describes its evolution toward a place between home and work, including the introduction of more comfortable, lived-in interiors during the 1990s. Seating was part of the invitation to spend time in the coffeehouse, rather than merely purchase a drink and leave.
The analytical question is what changes when that invitation matters. Imagine a customer meeting a friend at a familiar coffeehouse. The drink remains important, but the customer may also value having somewhere comfortable to talk, knowing how the visit will work, and not having to negotiate an unfamiliar setting. In that situation, comparing coffee prices alone would miss part of what is being purchased.
For another customer, the same store may offer little more than convenient access to a preferred drink. I would not interpret that relationship as inferior. It simply reflects a different occasion and a different set of needs. A useful brand case must make room for both customers rather than turning the company’s preferred story into a universal account of consumer behavior.
Starbucks therefore complements Apple. Apple helps us examine a system that can accompany people across activities. Starbucks helps us examine the value of a setting to which people return. Both can become familiar, but familiarity develops through different encounters and needs to be maintained in different ways.
Starbucks Makes the Cost of Changing the Experience Easier to See
A particularly revealing moment came in September 2024, when Brian Niccol’s opening Back to Starbucks letter acknowledged problems including overly transactional visits, inconsistent products, long waits, and hectic handoffs. The response emphasized supporting baristas, improving morning service, and reestablishing the community coffeehouse. Those were not simply changes to advertising. They concerned the operation customers actually encountered.
What interests me is the tension between different kinds of value. A person collecting a mobile order may want speed and predictability. Someone sitting inside may value calm, comfort, and a less hurried atmosphere. Both are legitimate needs, but serving them through the same space and preparation system requires deliberate choices.
It would be too easy to conclude that technology weakens the experience. It can also remove frustrations and give employees more time to serve customers. The question is whether the operation has been designed so that convenience for one visitor does not create unnecessary difficulty for another. Efficiency should be assessed across the experience, not only at the point where an order is placed.
This is why the Starbucks case study examines belonging alongside the pressures of growth. I chose the company not only to explain how experiential meaning develops, but also to examine how easily operating decisions can alter it.
The Comparison Matters More Than the Similarities
There is a temptation to place successful brands into a common formula: provide a good product, create emotion, and cultivate loyal customers. I find that explanation too broad to be very useful. It tells a manager little about which part of the experience deserves investment or what might be lost through a proposed change.
The contrast between Apple and Starbucks is more instructive. For the photographer in the earlier example, value may depend on continuity between tasks and confidence in familiar tools. For the coffeehouse visitor, value may depend on a comfortable setting and an interaction that feels welcoming. Both relationships can be personally relevant, but the businesses would need different capabilities to support them.
Neither distinction is absolute. Apple also operates physical spaces, and Starbucks also has a digital relationship with customers. I use the contrast to direct attention, not to create rigid categories. A comparison becomes useful when it helps us ask what the customer values in a particular situation and which organizational decisions preserve that value.
This also explains why copying visible features is insufficient. A smaller company does not acquire Apple’s customer relationships by adopting a similar visual style. Nor does placing comfortable chairs in a store establish the meaning of a coffeehouse. The feature has to fit the customer’s purpose and work with the rest of the experience.
Stronger Meaning Creates Greater Responsibility
One reason to study these brands together is that success can create obligations a company did not initially anticipate. Once customers have learned to expect a particular kind of value, an operational change may be interpreted as a change in the relationship. What appears internally to be a product adjustment can feel externally like the loss of something important.
Consider a hypothetical technology company associated with making work easier. Adding capabilities might appear to strengthen its offer, but if the result becomes difficult to navigate, the addition could undermine its central promise. Similarly, a hospitality business could increase the number of customers it serves while making the setting less suitable for the visits its existing customers valued.
I would therefore ask managers to define the benefit they are protecting before defending a particular feature. Customers may value ease rather than a specific interface, or welcome rather than a particular chair. Preserving every detail would make adaptation impossible. Preserving the customer benefit gives innovation a clearer direction.
This is the connection between brand meaning and strategy that I want these cases to bring into focus. Meaning is not merely a description used after a business decision. It should help evaluate the decision before the company commits to it.
What These Cases Can and Cannot Tell Us
Familiar examples can make a theory easier to understand, but they do not establish it by themselves. A customer’s willingness to pay more, buy repeatedly, or remain within an ecosystem can have several explanations. Establishing attachment requires evidence about the relationship, not simply a persuasive interpretation of company success.
I also do not regard Apple and Starbucks as the only useful cases, or as templates every business should follow. Their scale, histories, resources, and categories create conditions that a smaller company may not share. Studying only prominent brands would also risk overlooking less visible businesses that create substantial value for customers.
Their usefulness here is more specific. They help us notice questions we might otherwise overlook: whether the customer values the product or the larger occasion, whether familiarity reflects preference or inconvenience, and whether growth strengthens the experience or changes its character. Those questions remain useful even when the reader works in a completely different industry.
What I Hope Readers Take From the Two Studies
For someone building a brand, I would begin with the customer’s purpose rather than the desired emotional response. Identify what the person is trying to accomplish and examine how the company helps. Then look at the experience surrounding that benefit: where it creates confidence, where it creates friction, and where it may become connected with something personally important.
For someone managing an established brand, I would ask what customers might lose through the next change. The answer may reveal value that is missing from the company’s performance measures. A feature that appears inefficient in isolation might support an important customer occasion, while an apparently successful innovation might create difficulty elsewhere in the relationship.
These are not reasons to resist growth. They are reasons to understand it more fully. A business can improve its offer and preserve meaning at the same time, but it must know which part of the customer relationship makes that meaning worthwhile.
The companion Spotify discussion of Apple’s path from usefulness to attachment offers another way to explore these ideas alongside the written studies. The aim across both formats is to make the research useful for evaluating decisions, rather than simply attaching academic language to familiar company stories.
Apple and Starbucks were compelling choices because they make the distance between a transaction and a relationship visible. One draws our attention to the tools and systems people incorporate into their lives; the other to the places and occasions they return to. Together, they invite a more demanding understanding of brand strength: not just whether customers continue buying, but what they value enough to continue choosing, and whether the business still delivers it.