Apple, Ibm and Microsoft in a war of signs

Abstract

The aim of my paper is exploring how image contributes on building the brand identity of specific organisations and how the meaning of the image can be resignified by the action of the players in a specific market. In particular, I will focus on the competition between three brands, Ibm, Apple, Microsoft. on the information technology market. My work is looking forward to be a continuation of the essay “Le vie du Logo” published in “Identités visuelles” by Jean Marie Floch about the visual competition between Apple and Ibm. I will use the tools of sociosemiotics, plastic and figurative analysis, screening more than 20 years of competition starting from 1984, the year in which the analysis of Jean Marie Floch ends up. The analysis will proceed on a “total look” perspective, analysing the visual existence of the brands, getting started from the logos up to the advertising visuals and commercial videos, blending semiotics tools with the anthropology reflection and marketing analysis, driving semiotic theory towards social and marketing research on positioning. My contribution will clearly identify the critical trasformations of the brands in exam (mainly in a visual perspective) underlining how these changes are progressively trasforming the shape of the market itself (for example, the Microsoft entrance on the market, the Apple crisis, the Ipod generation, the Ibm and Linux alliance...), proposing a model that is explaining and summing up the relationships between all these brands in a temporal and oppositive point of view.