Hand Sanitizer or Apple

I wrote three words in my notes that I can't stop thinking about: home, not house. Identity is everything. It's the thing that decides how much value someone actually gets from what you make. And most businesses get it exactly backwards.

The hand sanitizer problem

When a business tries to be squeaky clean — safe, neutral, inoffensive, professional in the most forgettable way — its identity becomes hand sanitizer. And hand sanitizer is just there. Nobody feels anything about it. Nobody chooses it. It's a commodity you reach for because it's on the shelf.

The alternative isn't being louder. It's being yourself, all the way, on purpose.

Apple made identity the product

Take a monolith like Apple. It had a strong identity from the start, and that identity is what let it become what it is. Microsoft had an identity too — but its identity was utility and control of the market. It made the operating system everybody used and put it everywhere. Microsoft simply is.

Apple did something different. It made identity the centerpiece of how the whole business operates. And here's the payoff: because the identity is the center, each individual thing Apple makes carries more value than an individual thing from a company built on pure utility.

I'll prove it on myself. I don't even own Apple products right now. But Apple sits in a good place in my head — and Microsoft doesn't come close. Talking through this, I basically convinced myself that my next laptop should be Apple. That's how well they run it. Their identity is so strong, and what they stand for lines up so cleanly, that a person who doesn't own their stuff will talk himself into buying it. I could never do that with Microsoft. I don't care about an Xbox. I don't care about Game Pass. Microsoft is loud and everywhere — the "I am exactly what you need, no one else can do it like me" B2B play. That works. But it's not the same thing as identity.

You can overlay this on anything. Drake almost had the Apple identity but lands closer to Microsoft. Kendrick is the Apple identity. Same variables, different weightings — and the moment you feel it, you already knew.

Why it lands where it lands

The interesting part is that I didn't reason my way to any of this. I felt it first, then went back and found the variables that explained the feeling. That's not a bug. Emotion is where everything finds its ground — emotion is energy in motion, and motion is how anything gets traction at all.

Which is exactly why identity beats being clean. A squeaky-clean brand gives people nothing to feel. A brand with a real identity signifies who it is, and lets the right people signify back. Trying to make a flawless first impression is its own kind of manipulation anyway — you're showing one vertical slice of yourself and calling it the whole. Put that at the top of your mind and all you do is morph, morph, morph, instead of showing up as what you actually are.

Show up as what you actually are, and the match that forms is a better match than anything you could have performed. Be the home. Let the hand sanitizer be hand sanitizer.