Palm Gets Apple Brand Head

Palm has quietly swelled the ranks of its marketing team with another one-time Apple executive, a discovery made today shows. Although unpublicized, the company has chosen Jeff Zwerner as its Senior Vice President of Brand Design and takes an executive who has worked twice with Apple to create its image, once between 1995 and 1996 as a Senior Art Director and again between 2001 and 2003 as its Creative Director for Packaging. He has also worked at numerous high-profile companies, including Coca-Cola, Disney, The Gap, HP, LL Bean and Nike.

Palm has hired on a large number of former Apple employees as part of the company makeover begun in 2007 but has almost exclusively focused on engineering and executive talent, such as now-CEO Jon Rubinstein as well as the employees responsible for adding and eventually restoring native iTunes sync for the Pre. Where most companies are forced to use in-between programs to sync media between iTunes and a given phone or media player, knowledge of iPod syncing processes has let Palm's hardware identify itself as Apple-made and show up in the iTunes device list as though it were an actual iPod.

Palm has already changed much of its aesthetic to have an Apple-like though not directly comparable brand, with minimalist packaging and a "natural" motif that includes the rock-like shape of the Pre and its optional Touchstone charger. [via PreCentral]

By Electronista Staff

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iPod, industry, iTunes, Palm, mobile phones, Apple