After being ousted for 11 years, Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 - He restructured the company, simplified operations, launched new products within six months, worked with a small team alongside ad agency and created the iconic 'Think Different' marketing campaign.
This was his speech as he introduced the campaign to his global marketing team :
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, Sony. It is one
of the greats of the greats. Not just in this country, but all around the
globe. But even a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s going
to retain its relevance and vitality, and the Apple brand has clearly
suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years. And we need to
bring it back. The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds.
It’s not to talk about MIPS and megahertz. It’s not to talk about why
we’re better than Windows. The dairy industry tried for twenty years to
convince you that milk was good for you. It’s a lie, but they tried
anyway. [Audience laughs.] And the sales have gone like this [down],
and then they tried “Got milk?” and the sales have gone like this [up]. “Got Milk?” doesn’t even talk about the price—matter of fact the focus
is on the absence of the price.
But the best example of all, and one of the greatest jobs of marketing
that 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 than a shoe company. In their ads, as you know,
they don’t ever talk about the price. They don’t ever tell you about their
air soles and why they’re better than Reebok’s air soles. What is Nike
doing in their advertising? They honor great athletes, and they honor
great athletics. That’s who they are, that’s what they are about.
Apple spends a fortune on advertising. You’d never know it. . . . So,
when I got here, Apple [had] just fired their agency and was in a
competition with twenty-three agencies that, you know, four years from
now they’d pick one. And we blew that up and we hired Chiat/Day, the
ad agency that I was fortunate enough to work with years ago, who
created some award-winning work, including the commercial voted the
best ad ever made, 1984, by advertising professionals.
And we started working with that agency again, and the question we
asked was: Our customers want to know, “Who is Apple, and what is it
that we stand for? Where do we sit 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 is 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 that those people who
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 get back to that core value. A lot of things have
changed. The market is a totally different place from what it was a
decade ago. And Apple is totally different, and Apple’s place in it is
totally different. . . . But values—and core values—those things
shouldn’t change. The things that Apple believes 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 am 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 ever used a computer, it would have been an Apple. The theme of the campaign is Think different, honoring the people who think different and who move this world forward.
And it is what we are about; it touches the soul of this company. . . . I hope that you feel the same way about it I do.