Apple CEO Tim Cook's Brand Strategy: Keep Blowing Your Mind

As Mobile World Congress attendees pore over the latest and greatest coming to a smartphone in Barcelona this week, the brand hovering over every booth's shoulder is Apple.

Not to discount Google's Android and other innovators, but the house that Steve Jobs built has consistently churned out products that have proved game changers for technology, computing, mobile, design and advertising/marketing, from its initial Macintosh in 1984 to the iPhone and iPad releases of recent years.

Now the man who took over as CEO after the death of Steve Jobs in October, Tim Cook, is telling investors that the company is getting ready to rock the world once again.

“You can be assured we are working as hard as ever this year to deliver an incredible year and some products that will blow your mind,” Cook told shareholders at the company’s annual meeting on Friday, Forbes reports.

As leader of the world's mobile and personal computing behemoth, Cook is under pressure to keep Apple, a la Jobs' playbook, a world-changing brand. He told the crowd, which included former VP Al Gore and former Disney chief Bob Iger, that he thought of Jobs every day but had turned his “great sadness … into an intense determination to continue the journey.”

With $100 billion burning a hole in the company's pocket, Apple is rumored to be getting more into the TV business, but Cook would only laugh and not comment about the subject when asked about it by a shareholder. Then he encouraged all there to “consider buying an AppleTV set-top box for $99,” Forbes notes.

One thing Cook did share is that he is happy about the company’s relationship with Facebook but said that the company “should be doing more with” its social rival, Twitter. Apple-watchers would do well to keep watching the cloud, too — see the brand's latest commercial, for iCloud, at top.