08 | When Brands Teach

We broke the news on the Amsterdam move to our three young sons in mid July 2022, shortly after we’d spent a second week there and confirmed for ourselves that it was the cobblestoned, charming city in the sun we wanted to spend our next years in. (Caveat: decidedly different vibes in the winter)

They were excited and puzzled. Mostly puzzled. Puzzled about this idea of a new culture and a new language, one neither my wife nor I spoke. So out came the iPhone and the tap to the App Store and the re-download of Duolingo.

In the six months leading up to our move, the boys eagerly logged on to laugh at the funny characters, maintain their streaks, and — generally — get sucked into the 80s neon arcade vibes of the Duolingo Experience. As we valiantly attempted to limit screen time, they crowded around the iPhone, mastering vocabulary like “sandwich” (boterham: which came up more than it should have) and phrases they would never utter in real life:

“I’m reading the newspaper.”
”They’re not boys, but we are.”
”The turtle walks slowly.”

Designing learning experiences for the Apple Store, we often asked ourselves how much we should teach. Is Today at Apple art school? Or is it really a more creative way to educate around the latest product features. We trended towards the latter, but always endeavored to provide a creative context, often drawing on artists and makers out in the world who had mastered the medium. It was aspirational, but with a reasonable end goal in sight.

Duolingo seems to operate on a different principle. “If you’re laughing, you’re learning,” says the brand’s head of animation (and ex Cartoon Network producer) in a talk she gave on Duolingo’s character universe. And, boy, is Duolingo laughing.

According to this very clever breakdown, the app grew its monthly active users from 24 million to over 85 million over the past 5 years. That means even after a pandemic in which people were stuck at home with idle thoughts of learning Mandarin, the growth has continued year on year. The number of premium subs has increased, and the daily active users increased from 23 percent to 30 percent, according to that Ryan Reeves breakdown (could also be the name of a wrestling move).

But what is it teaching? Its owl mascot is the toast of TIkTok, and their socials person gets name checked everywhere from Ad Age to the New Yorker. Their social strategy is a pure entertainment play. There’s no learning, just a wacky person in an owl costume that makes people giggle as they stop their scroll. Brand awareness brilliance. And the conversions certainly seem to be happening somewhere down that funnel.

Even Duolingo loyalists cop to the fact that the learning bit is but a start: immersion and further instruction are needed. But, hey, isn’t that enough? It’s doing a little more to broaden minds through language, in an environment that’s fun, supportive, and slightly stalker-ish.

Maybe a Duolingo streak will embolden someone to buy that ticket to Oslo and stumble through a coffee order as an English-fluent Norwegian barista looks on with growing empathy. But can the brand inspire action as well as it inspires screen addiction?

Today at Apple wasn’t art school. We hoped to nurture a creative spark, and earnestly wished that our session attendees would leave the store more mindful in the way they used Apple products in their world: taking photos in a way they hadn’t before, using iPads to create protest posters, etc. We aimed to transform the tool’s perception from one of passive consumption, to active creation. That was the hope, at least.

Brands teach to educate their customers on their product, or inspire them in ways beyond it: grocery stores or food brands with recipes (like this compelling WhatsApp approach from Hellman’s many years ago); ceramics brands like Heath that offer studio workshops, and so forth. Ultimately, they provide another path to stickiness: encouraging us to return again and again to get educated on new products, or features.

But for brands that have authority in a space, teaching can be something much more grand and meaningful. The embodiment of their brand promise to customers itself.