Apple's Steve Jobs Think Different / Crazy ones speech and advertising

When Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1996, the company was in a bad way. It had to be rebuild, rebranded and reinstated in peoples minds. The Apple brand had to learn what Apple was about and what they stood for. In 1997 they started the “Think Different” campaign. It made an almost miraculous turnover.

“It honours those people who has changed the world. Some of them are living. Some of them are not. But the ones who aren’t … as you’ll see … that if they ever used a computer, it would have been a Mac.”

To me marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world it’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.

Now apple fortunately is one of the half a dozen best brands in the whole world. Right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke, and Sony. It is one of the greats of the greats, not just in this country, but all around the globe. And but but but even a great brand needs investment and caring. If it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality. The Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years and we need to bring it back.

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“Got Milk?” advertising campaign

The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. It’s not to talk about nips and megahertz. It’s not to talk about why we’re better than Windows. The dairy industry tried for 20 years to convince you that milk was good for you. To lie. But they tried anyway and the sales were going like this and then they tried “Got Milk?” and the sales are going like this. “Got Milk?” doesn’t even talk about the product! That focuses on the absence of the product.

Nike’s advertising

The best example of all and one of the greatest jobs of marketing in the universe has ever seen is Nike. Remember Nike sells a commodity they sell shoes and yet when you think of Nike you feel something different from a shoe company. In their ads, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product they don’t ever tell you about their Air Souls and why they’re better than Reebok’s Air Souls. What does Nike do in their advertising is they honor great athletes. They honor great athletics that’s who they are, that’s what they are about.

Apple’s advertising

Apple spends a fortune on advertising, you never know it, so when I got here Apple just fired their agency. They were doing a competition with 23 agencies that you know four years from now. We picked one and we blew that up and we hired Chaite the ad agency that I was fortunate enough to work with years ago.

We created some award-winning work including the commercial voted the best ad ever made in 1984 by advertising professionals. And we started working about eight weeks ago and what the question we asked was our customers want to know “who is Apple?” and “what is it that we stand for?” and “where do we fit in this world?”

And what we’re about isn’t making boxes for people to get their jobs done, although we do that well, we do that better than almost anybody in some cases. But Apple’s about something more than that. Apple at the core, its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.

That’s what we believe and we’ve had the opportunity to work with people like that. We’ve had an opportunity to work with people like you, with software developers, with customers, who have done it in some big and some small ways.

And we believe that in this world people can change it for the better. And that those people that are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones that actually do. And so what we’re going to do in our first brand marketing campaign, in several years, is to is to get back to that core value.

A lot of things have changed the market’s a totally different place than it was a decade ago and Apple’s totally different. And Apple’s place in it is totally different. And believe me the products and the distribution strategies manufacturing are totally different. And we understand that but values and core values those things shouldn’t change the things that Apple believed in. At its core are the same things that Apple really stands for today. And so we wanted to find a way to communicate this and what we have is something that I’m very moved by.

It honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are living, some of them are not. But the ones that aren’t, as you’ll see, you know that if they’ve ever used the computer, it would have been a Mac.

And the theme of the campaign is ‘think different’ it’s the people honoring the people who think different and who move this world forward. And it’s it is what we are about it touches the soul of this company, so I’m gonna go ahead and roll it and I hope that you feel the same way about it I did