Steve Jobs' opinion about Marketing

Steve Jobs’ opinion about Marketing

To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world. And we’re not gonna 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 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, all around the world. But, even a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s gonna retain its relevance and vitality, and 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 fees. It’s not to talk about bits and mega-hertz. It’s not to talk about why we are better than Windows. The dairy industry tried for 20 years to convince you that milk was good for you. It’s a lie, but they tried anyway. And the sales were going like this, and then they tried “Got Milk?”, and the sales were going like this. Got Milk wasn’t even talking about the product, in fact, it focuses on the absence of the product. 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 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 about their product. They don’t ever tell you about their air soles, and why we are better than Reebok’s air soles. What does Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes, and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are, and that’s what they are about. Apple spends a fortune on advertising. You’d never know it. You’d never know it. So when I got here, Apple just fired their agency, and there was a competition with 23 agencies that you know four years from now we could pick one, and we blew that up, and hired Chiat Day. The ad agency that I was fortunate enough to work with years ago, and created some award winning work, including the commercial voted the best ad ever made, 1984, by advertising professionals. And, we started working about eight weeks ago, 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 fit in this world?” 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, we have had the opportunity to work with people like that. We’ve had the opportunity to work with people like you with software developers, with customers, who have done it in some big, in some small ways. And, we believe that in this world people can change the world for the better. And, that those people who are crazy enough to think that 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 in a total different place than where it was a decade ago. And, Apple is totally different, and Apple’s place in it is totally different, and believe me, the products, and the distribution strategy and the 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 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’ll know that if they ever used a computer it would have been a Mac. And, the theme of the campaign is “Think Different” It’s honoring the people who think different, and move this world forward, and 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 you feel the same way about I do.

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes are the ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And, while some may see them as crazy ones. We see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.