An internal Apple video is running these days on social networks in which Steve Jobs explains the rationale for a marketing campaign to a group of people. It was recorded shortly after his return to the company, in 1997. In ten years, the company had lost its way, beset by debt and without a plan to get back on its feet.
Jobs did not have a single new product that he could offer his customers. But he had a mark that did not leave anyone indifferent. In the video, the visionary co-founder of Apple explains that there is something that remains beyond the items that are sold to customers. “Our main value – he pointed out – is that we believe that people with passion are capable of improving the world”. That was the reason for an advertising campaign that is still attached to the brand 25 years after the Think Different ad was broadcast.
A soft piano melody accompanied black and white images of geniuses such as Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, Muhammad Ali, Maria Callas, Mahatma Gandhi, Alfred Hitchcock, or Pablo Picasso. A voice-over –which in one of the versions of the ad was recorded by Jobs himself– narrated the vocation for the characters who go against the current and make humanity advance: “this is for the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers . Those who go against the current, those who see things differently”, began the spot, which ended with a sentence: “only people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do”.
The motto "Think different" is the soul of Apple. Since its beginnings in a garage in Los Altos (California) in 1975, it is the company that has best defined the digital revolution by creating new product categories. His first great creation was the Macintosh, a computer that marked the way for what the computers we have today should be.
Always under the leadership of Jobs, Apple created the connected computer with the iMac, which saved a company on the verge of bankruptcy; the iPod, which transformed the music industry; the iPhone and its app ecosystem, which completely revolutionized mobile telephony; or the iPad, which defined how portable tablets should be.
Jobs died in 2011. Four years later, his successor at Apple, Tim Cook, introduced the Apple Watch, which sent connected watches off the ground. In 2023, the apple company wants to define another category, perhaps the most difficult, with its extended reality viewer: glasses that mix augmented and virtual reality. Next Monday I will attend that announcement in Cupertino. There may be many doubts about whether such a product will be a success, but what is certain is that Apple remains faithful to the founding idea: they think differently.
