Steve Jobs is God ...

... or so the fervour with which Apple fans worship their brand would make it seem.

I watched "Secrets of the Superbrands", a new series which started on BBC3 last night, beginning with an episode focussing on Technology. If you're remotely interested in the World we live in today the best thing to do is watch it but, if you don't have time, carry on reading.

Alex Riley presents "Secrets of the Superbrands"

The presenter, Alex Riley, spent time on each of the key technology brands and very succinctly managed to give some interesting and often surprising insights into their strategies for success.

He opened with Apple, which commands evangelical support from its disciples. We watch as an avid Apple fan has his head examined, literally, with an MRI scan. Electrical responses measured as he watched a slide show of technology items showed his brain light up when he saw Apple products. This response was the same as very devout religious people responding to the sight of their religious icons.

Riley asked the question on all our lips: "How does a brand work in religious terms?"

The answer he proposes is that it needs:

1. A Story: in Apple's case, two guys in a garage ...
2. The Antichrist: IBM
3. The Place of Worship: Apple stores and all the mysticism that surrounds their evangelical opening events
4. The Messiah: Steve Jobs who, like Jesus, was cast out by his people and, unlike Jesus (yet), had a Second Coming and rescued Apple from oblivion in the '90's with the iMac, iPod and all those other iThings.

An Apple store opens in Covent Garden

The programme then moved on to Microsoft explaining how IBM, who made the hardware, engaged Bill Gates to write the software and allowed him to keep the rights to everything he had written. Oops!

Then the astonishing fact that Sony's Playstation 3 costs $805 to manufacture and retails for $499, creating around $3 billion in losses for the company so far. The reason Riley gives for this is that Sony is using Playstation as a "Trojan Horse" for its BluRay disc technology in a bid to win against Toshiba's HD DVD. Sony is desperate not to repeat the mistakes of the '80's when its Betamax video cassette lost out to the VHS format from JVC. Apparently, the reason for their failure was prudishness and an unwillingness to allow the porn industry to use their video format. JVC had no such qualms and, these days, nor do Sony.

The programme continued with the story of mobile phones and how Nokia has become the Old Man of the industry, some evasive interviews with the folks from Facebook and finally Google, how they managed to position themselves as the gate-keeper of the internet.

And that, according to Riley, is the secret to the success of technology superbrands: they control the doorway to a larger experience. The reason Nokia is currently failing is that "they're just making gizmos".