Call It A Catjacking: Apple Hijacks AI With Personal Intelligence Category

There’s an old mini-presentation I have to disabuse clients of the need to Find Your Why. It's called Three Reasons Simon Sinek is a Bad Man. The gist is that academic thought leaders have the luxury of reverse engineering a case study in which they had zero involvement to make it fit into the narrative around their expertise, over-simplifying usually complex processes or executions. Frequently, it’s around something Apple has or has not done.

So, let’s talk about Apple Intelligence and Category Strategy.

Apple has flexed its category strategy acumen by rebrandingAI as "Apple Intelligence," and introducing a new category: the "Personal Intelligence System." This move is not merely a rebranding effort but a category hijacking, leveraging the principles of laddering to further a unique market position.

Hijacks occur when a rogue player ejects the current driver and leaves them on the roadside to watch the new owner speed off in their vehicle, ie Apple Intelligence (AI).

Laddering involves linking product attributes to functional and emotional benefits, ultimately aligning them with consumers’ core values. It’s called “Ladder” because the strategy elevates benefits of the brand from technical to functional to emotional.

Apple’s hijack of AI illustrates Laddering:

- Attributes: Apple Intelligence is user-friendly, seamlessly integrated with the Apple ecosystem, and highly personalized.
- Functional Benefits: These attributes translate into practical advantages such as enhanced user experience, ease of interaction, and seamless integration across devices.
- Emotional Benefits: With a Personal Intelligence System, users feel a sense of personalization, confidence in their technology, and a feeling of being understood and valued by their devices.
- Personal Values: At the highest level, Apple’s Personal Intelligence System is not just a tool; it becomes an integral part of users’ lives that enhance their daily experiences.

Laddering also provides a useful way to see the relationship between the technology and the category, with the technology (AI) value prop existing on the lower rungs, and the category providing the higher order value propositions.

Not only does Laddering help guide the strategy and position of the brand, but when done correctly/strategically it depositions the competition by implicitly and/or explicitly highlighting the limited value as a lower order value proposition, providing a clear contrast to the alternative and/or preexisting. The Apple Intelligence category hijacking changes how consumers perceive AI—not as a complex, impersonal technology, but as an intuitive and intelligent, personalized assistant that enhances their daily lives.

Additionally, by calling the category a "Personal Intelligence System," Apple shifted the focus from the technology itself to the user experience, making it more personal and accessible.

🎙 Listen now as Dustin and Mike discuss all the category strategy elements of the move in Episode 49 of The SaaS Brand Strategy Show.

‍

Apple’s rebranding of its AI technology to the "Personal Intelligence System" is a masterclass in category strategy and design. But the trick is in how it seems natural, logical, even inevitable. That’s because Apple has spent bazillions of dollars embedding its brand affiliations in the market’s collective memory: Simplicity, creativity, humanity, and more recently, security. The execution of Apple Intelligence aligns, supports, and actually proves those to be true. That is how brand work informs the product roadmap.

Following the launch of the Spatial Computing category, Personal Intelligence System is the second recent example of Apple embracing and crushing category strategy.