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One of the best talks on branding comes from Steve Jobs’s announcement of Apple’s “Think Different” campaign after his return to the company in 1996. He opens with a simple idea: marketing is about values. In a noisy world where no one remembers much, a company has to be crystal clear about what it wants people to know about it.
Jobs points to Nike as the gold standard. Nike sells a commodity—shoes—but its brand communicates something far more emotional. They don’t talk about features or air soles. They celebrate athletes and the spirit of athletic excellence. “That’s who they are, that’s what they are about,” Jobs says. Seth Godin makes a similar point in a later blog post: if Nike launched a hotel, you’d immediately imagine what it would feel like. If Hyatt launched a shoe, you’d have no idea what it would stand for. Nike owns a brand; Hyatt owns assets.
Jobs explains that Apple needed to reconnect with its own identity. Customers wanted to know who Apple was and what it stood for—not just what products it made. Apple wasn’t simply a company that built computers; at its core, it believed that people with passion could change the world. That belief shaped everything. “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who actually do,” he said.
The “Think Different” campaign was Apple’s way of returning to that core value. So much about the company had changed—its products, its strategy, its operations—but its values hadn’t. And those values were the point of the campaign: to honor the people who moved the world forward, whether they were alive or not. As Jobs put it, if those icons had ever used a computer, “it would’ve been a Mac.”
The campaign didn’t celebrate products; it celebrated the people Apple admired. And in doing so, it reminded the world what Apple truly stood for.
