With all the Olympic-themed ads that have been running during the London Summer Games, some might see the "Apple Genius" ads that debuted the first weekend of the games as a breath of fresh air. They featured a youthful employee who's been let loose from an Apple store's genius bar — still wearing his blue t-shirt and, whether it be on a plane, above, a street corner, or an apartment building, heroically ready to solve consumers' computer problems in the name of touting the brand's Mac line.

More often than not (under the watchful eye of an intensely involved Steve Jobs), Apple ads have always been considered a cut above the ordinary if not positively in a league of their own. Apple has always found a way to advertise a product with a good dose of humanity and a touch of humor. Witness the lauded "I'm a Mac" series from several years ago that brilliantly personified the differences between a Mac and a PC, and the current Siri campaign for the iPhone that feature celebrities including Zooey Deschanel, Samuel L. Jackson, John Malkovich and Martin Scorsese having intensely personal conversations with their iPhones.Continue reading...

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Lexus is doubling down on customer service. Borrowing a page from Apple, the luxury brand known for coddling customers is helping its dealers create a sort of automotive Genius Bar of technology and delivery specialists to help buyers figure out all the state-of-the-art features on their vehicles.

"We're focusing on improving the delivery process, so [dealers] are hiring for new positions aimed at improving customer satisfaction," Mark Templin, general manager of the Lexus division, said. Many of Lexus's 230 U.S. dealers will staff up their sales departments by as much as 20 percent as part of this sweeping initiative, Vincent Salisbury, training manager of the company's Lexus College brand-education operation, told brandchannel.

For one thing, of course, Lexus wants to avoid the kind of fiasco that swept over Ford last year when MyFord Touch came without adequate customer or dealership-staff instruction and whacked the brand's "quality" ratings in J.D. Power and Consumer Reports evaluations. Continue reading...