Steve Jobs argues that marketing should communicate core values rather than product specifications. Using examples (the dairy 'got milk' campaign and Nike), he diagnoses Apple's weakened brand and declares Apple's central belief: that passionate people can change the world; he announces a return to brand-focused marketing to re-center that value.
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. 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 are going like this. GOP 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. 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 places. 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 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 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.
