In this speech, Steve Jobs explains his view that marketing is fundamentally about communicating a company's core values rather than technical specifications. He argues that even world‑class brands like Apple must continually invest in brand relevance, using examples such as Nike’s value‑driven advertising and the Got Milk campaign to illustrate how successful marketing focuses on ideas, not products. Jobs describes how Apple, after a period of neglect, re‑engaged an ad agency to create the iconic "Think Different" campaign, which honors innovators and positions Apple as a champion of passionate people who change the world. He emphasizes that while products, distribution, and manufacturing evolve, the underlying values must remain constant, and the new campaign is meant to reconnect customers with those timeless principles.
Chapters
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 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 had gone like this. Got Milk doesn't even talk about the product. Matter of fact, it focuses on the absence of the product. But the best example of all, and one of the greatest jobs of marketing 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. And their ads, as you know, they don't ever talk about the product. They don't ever tell you about their air soles and why they're 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. 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. They were doing a competition with 23 agencies that, you know, four years from now would have picked one. And we blew that up and we hired Chaithe, 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 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? 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 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 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 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, 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 a max. 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 is what we are about. It touches the soul of this company. So I'm going to go ahead and roll it, and I hope that you feel the same way about it I do.
Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes. 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. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them, because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
