These days an internal Apple video is circulating on social networks in which Steve Jobs explains to a group of people the basis of a marketing campaign. It was recorded shortly after he returned to the company, in 1997. Within ten years, the company had lost its way, drowned in debt and without a plan to break even.
Jobs didn’t have a single new product to offer customers. But he had a brand that left no one indifferent. In the video, the visionary co-founder of Apple explains that there is something that goes beyond the items that are sold to customers. “Our main value – he pointed out – is that we believe that people with passion are capable of improving the world”. This was the reason for an advertising campaign that continues to be linked to the brand 25 years after the Think different ad was broadcast.
A gentle piano melody accompanied black and white images of geniuses such as Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, Muhammad Ali, Maria Callas, Mahatma Ghandi, Alfred Hitchcock or Pablo Picasso. A voice-over – recorded by Jobs himself in one of the versions of the ad – narrated the vocation for characters who go against the grain and advance humanity: “This is for the crazy, the misfits, the rebels, the problematic Those who go against the grain, those who see things differently”, began the spot, which ended with a sentence: “Only the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do it”.
The slogan “Think different” is the soul of Apple. Since its beginnings in a garage in Los Altos (California) in 1975, it is the company that has best defined the digital revolution by creating new product categories. His first great creation was the Macintosh, a computer that paved the way for what the computers we have today were to be.
Always under the leadership of Jobs, Apple created the connected computer with the iMac, which saved a company on the verge of bankruptcy; the iPod, which transformed the music industry; the iPhone and its ecosystem of apps, which completely revolutionized mobile telephony, or the iPad, which defined how portable tablets should be.
Jobs died in 2011. Four years later, his successor at Apple, Tim Cook, introduced the Apple Watch, which took off connected watches. In 2023, the apple company wants to define another category, perhaps the most difficult one, with its augmented reality viewer: glasses that mix augmented and virtual reality. Next Monday I will attend the announcement in Cupertino. There may be many doubts about whether such a product will be a success, but what is indisputable is that Apple remains true to the founding idea: they think differently.
