Something about resorting to celebrities feels shallow and inconsequential to a brand, becoming a turn off to a brand that used to be the rebellious, uncompromising underdog and is now an elite brand for its inherent value. It makes Apple seem like they’re trying too hard by picking the almost cliche cool of Samuel L. Jackson and quirky too cute Zooey Deschanel. I’m not any expert on what’s cool, but I do know that by trying too hard to be cool, it starts to feel uncool.

I hate to fall into the trap that the tech press does by looking for the canary in the coal mine, but these feel like ads Steve Jobs would have nixed, even last minute after possibly asking for them to be made.

What incentives are being offered for creative thinking? Are new ideas being fostered by team leaders? Is cross-department collaboration and consolidation of production being encouraged, or do business politics get in the way of honest estimates and new ideas that may challenge established authority. Do budget turf wars cause companies to wind up competing within themselves so much, it leaves them soft to competition?

The smaller, more nimble version of Apple around the year 2001, after Steve Jobs and his executive team streamlined and downsized the company, was more focused was suddenly in prime position to quickly unseat Sony as a stand-out leader in portable music. The Walkman was the iPod of its time, a household name among casual music buyers from a company with a very high brand image. Sony even owned a music division and plenty of technology divisions that they shouldn’t have been so easy to knock off, but since the late 90s, challengers in the technology sector like Samsung (TV), Microsoft (video games) and Apple (portable music/computers) are quickly beating Sony at its own game.

Entrepreneurship will be a driving force to disrupt some established brands too inefficient to remain strong leaders of industry. If a company’s culture is too wrapped up in itself, it’s likely a bad sign of poor focus on big picture goals.

If you bought a piece of crap that actually hurts your brand, then you just have a piece of crap app to appease your executives, who should be asking you why you sunk cash into it. “Make an app for the sake of having an app” is not a good goal.

Do you have people at your company with a keen eye for quality and enough business sense to steer you clear of third parties looking to sell you a piece of crap? You may have one internally with an internal web design team and are not utilizing them. If not, hire a firm with good mobile user experience design strategy skills and experience, not just some firm reaching for new business from you and throwing an app together.

Make sure your IT team, marketing or outside vendors have your business’s best interest at heart and have a good strategy for this expense. Is your website design, content and performance optimized for a phone’s size and utilizing the features of these newer web browsers? Slightly more Americans (36.4%) use their mobile browser than access applications (34.4%) – source via Luke Wroblewski. You should be focusing on that too.

A mobile-optimized site works for both major mobile browsers and is probably less expensive, since it uses the same kind of code for both Android and iPhone browsers. Apps require different builds and likely cost more to release. You only need a native app if you need to know more about the user, other than location, and need access hardware, like the phone’s camera, or data on the app, like an address book or calendar app.

My opinion is probably not popular, because it challenges some lazy IT management (you know you’re out there) to relinquish some control to a user experience design professional and take a little longer to do the best job possible. It may even do the opposite and discourages someone’s costly pet project at a corporation or from an unscrupulous consultant.

If you find that you do have a need for an app and did a proper cost-benefit analysis, but want to go cheap and skip the user experience design steps, you’ll get a maintenance problem instead of a solution, an IT or business manager with terrible vision whose decision making is having a negative impact that they don’t even recognize, and you get a scar on your brand integrity, all to save the cost of proper design and strategy.

Good luck to you.

And yes, I’m aware this site isn’t entirely mobile-optimized. I’m actively working on it.