Apple is still shining despite the loss of Jobs
A fortnight ago Steve Jobs announced that he was resigning as chief executive of Apple with Tim Cook, the former chief operating officer, taking over.
Jobs guided the company he had founded in 1976 from the difficult days of the late 1990s to become one of the most successful and biggest companies in the world.
As the public face of Apple he has become synonymous with new products, with items like the iPod, iPad and iPhone reinventing the way the world interacted with technology.
Speculation has been rife since the announcement about how Apple would cope without Jobs at the helm. Much of course will depend on the way the company operates and how important one man is to it, but we can use YouGov’s BrandIndex data to measure the immediate impact on public perception.
As we would expect attention (the number of people hearing news about Apple, whether it be good or bad) rose immediately both in the UK and in the US.
Index, an amalgamation of six key measures – impression, quality, value, reputation, satisfaction and recommendation – also rose slightly in both countries and although those gains were not that large and have, to some extent, fallen back in the last couple of days the very positive news for Apple is that it has increased rather than decreased.
These are of course early days but Apple can certainly be buoyed by the fact that its already high scores (which are in the high +30s for index in both countries) have not been harmed and the public does not feel any different about the Apple brand since the departure of Jobs.
Stephan Shakespeare is the chief executive of YouGov