Douglas Atkin is a partner and chief strategy officer at advertising agency Merkley + Partners and has worked for some of the world's most successful brands, from Procter & Gamble to jetBlue. An expert on the relationship between consumers and brands, he knows about iconic branding from the consumer side, too: "I'm a self-confessed Apple loyalist," he tells FRONTLINE in this interview. Macintosh, Atkin says, is an example of a "cult brand," one that inspires a loyalty as intense as religious devotion by selling an implicit idea, identity, or community along with a product. "At the end of the day, Apple is a box of electronics," he says. "What makes them different?... When I'm buying an Apple, I'm not buying a clever box of electronics; I'm buying the belief that I'm a nonconformist." This interview was conducted on Feb. 2, 2004.

The difference nowadays is that there are [more] products than consumers need. ... Long ago, producers ruled. The consumer was almost sort of panting for the next innovation, the next new detergent, the next breakthrough in technology. Now they're not. There are more products than consumers, and the producer has to have some kind of different way of selling them.

A brand originally was a way for a producer of a brand, like a maker of beer, to put their ownership symbol on it and to give it a sense of authenticity. And this was really, really important when the Industrial Revolution happened, because beer or any other product was distributed widely, away from where it was produced. So, for example, Bass beer, which was the first official brand, put the red triangle on its bottle to show that it was real beer; it was consistent high quality. Now all of that has changed. Brands have a completely different function in my mind, because the producer is not king; the consumer is.