The Wiki Man | 5 June 2010

A few years ago a leisure centre advertised ‘Keep-fit classes for the over-60s’. Nobody turned up. To broaden the appeal, they advertised ‘Keep-fit classes for the over-50s’. The sessions sold out. Not one of those joining was under 65 years of age.

How many 65-year-olds want to attend anything aimed at the over-60s? And how many small cars would be sold if advertisements showed them being driven by pensioners (the people who actually buy them) rather than elfin 27-year-olds in capri pants?

‘User imagery’ it’s called, and it is a more powerful force than any of us would like to admit. Not only in what it makes us do, but in what it stops us doing. That sense of ‘who I am not’ means, for instance, that I can never go on a skiing holiday, even though I would probably enjoy it, because for some reason I hate the thought of being the kind of person who goes skiing. I cannot own a BMW for the same reason. And it’s the same herd-instinct-in-reverse that explains why many music-lovers cannot stomach going to the opera, why left-wing people cannot wear blazers, why middle-class people stopped smoking, why everyone stopped drinking sherry and why Liberal Democrats are more difficult to convert into Tory voters than Labour voters are — self-image being a more stubborn force than self-interest.

It was this question of self-image that was, until now, the reason I could never wholeheartedly buy into the cult of Apple. In truth, I loved the products — but found the behaviour of the brand’s adherents slightly creepy. Apple-lovers seemed to me a cult obsessed with their own otherness, with a superior sense of being different — a little like Liberal Democrats, funnily enough, or evangelical Christians.