What Was Apple Thinking When It Launched Ad Without Product?

Shreesh Shankar Dec 24, 2020

In 1981, a top software developer named Bud Tribble in Apple had said that Steve Jobs had a “reality distortion field” when he came to know that Jobs had set a 10-month time frame to ship Macintosh software. The term became a popular point of reference for the next two decades whenever the tech industry came to know of a new idea that the Apple co-founder was trying to incubate.

Jobs was ousted from Apple a few years later, in 1987, as his ideas failed to generate profits. But in the next 10 years, a string of CEOs had failed to capture the imagination of consumers and were serving up products that seemed to be just ceding more and more market share to Microsoft and IBM.

The company’s board realised that the company was rudderless without the maverick of Jobs. He was reinstated at the helm of affairs in Apple in 1997 when he came back to find a sorry state of affairs — Apple had a 90-day runway before being forced to shut down. That’s when Jobs started looking for an advertising campaign that would restore the company’s reputation.

The genesis

Chiat/Day was among several top agencies who were looking to land the job with Apple.

Top executives from the advertising firm met Jobs and got a brief that the brand had to be rejuvenated from its status of a niche cultural marker for geeks.

There was no time to put together a detailed strategy, according to a former executive of the agency. Creatives were asked to sketch ideas and show up at a brainstorming session in a week’s time. On pitch day, an art director at the agency named Craig Tanimoto came up with the rough idea of what became the Think Different campaign.

It was a billboard campaign with black and white images of revolutionary people and events — Einstein, Edison, Gandhi, a girl carrying a flower in front of gun barrels during a protest against the Vietnam War. The rainbow-colored Apple logo featured above each picture along with the words “Think Different.”Just that.

The thesis

Steve Jobs said that the idea behind the campaign was to communicate the values that Apple stands for rather than sell a particular product. While speaking about the campaign, the iconic Silicon Valley innovator had said that the brand had lost its appeal among consumers and to bring back the sheen it was important that people knew about the core value of the company — the belief that someone who is passionate enough can change the world for the better.

The way to convince people of Apple’s uniqueness wasn’t by talking about speed and prices, bits and megahertz — just asserting the superiority of its products over competitors’ wouldn’t cut ice with the public.

Jobs took the cue from Nike’s ad campaigns — they rarely are about specific products. Most of the sportswear giant’s marketing campaigns are always focussed on athletes and athletics and speak about the company’s values.

What is values based marketing and why it’s so relevant today

Values-based marketing is an appeal to a consumer’s values and ethics — what they think about a political issue, about gender discrimination or even the environment.

If a brand shares the same concerns, the consumer’s empathy can be leveraged to motivate their purchasing decisions. The better strategy however is to take the lead and walk the talk. For instance, Kraft Foods changed its advertising strategy when a market study showed a shift in consumer opinions relating to direct promotions of junk food to children.

According to a survey by Accenture, nearly two-thirds (63%) of global consumers prefer to buy products and services from companies that stand for a purpose that reflects their own values and beliefs, and will avoid companies that don't.

Conclusion

The digital space and data-driven marketing in recent years has led to brands looking for quick wins with clicks and carts. While such an approach may somehow appear to be reaping dividends in the short term, it would become unsustainable in the long term as the customer acquisition cost remains high.

As such the focus is once again shifting to brand marketing from performance marketing. Gap has admitted advertising discounts at the expense of building brand loyalty for Old Navy was a mistake, joining brands like Adidas and Kraft who are moving spending back to brand marketing after realising they were spending too much in the wrong areas. But if you want to stay ahead of the curve, the buzzwords are ‘value marketing’. Perhaps, it is time to sit back and think about the core values of your brand and how you can communicate them best.