Steve Jobs on how to build a great brand

October 05, 2023

My favorite talk on branding is Steve Jobs's announcement of the "Think different" campaign after re-joining Apple in 1996.

He opens with the statement:

“To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated and noisy world. We’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

He cites Nike as one of the greatest jobs of marketing the universe has ever seen:

“Remember, Nike sells a commodity—they sell shoes! And yet when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, they don’t ever talk about the product. They don’t ever tell you about their air soles and why they are 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.”

Marketing guru Seth Godin also used Nike as an example of great branding in a blog post a few years ago:

“If Nike announced that they were opening a hotel, you’d have a pretty good guess about what it would be like. But if Hyatt announced that they were going to start making shoes, you would have NO IDEA WHATSOEVER what those shoes would be like. That’s because Nike owns a brand and Hyatt simply owns real estate.”

Jobs goes on to explain how the Apple team arrived at the “Think Different” campaign:

“Our customers want to know who is Apple and what is it that we stand for. Where do we fit in this world? 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 is about something more than that. Apple at the core—its core value—is that we believe people with passion can change the world for the better… And that those people who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who actually do.”

He continues:

“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 is in a totally different place than it was a decade ago, and Apple is totally different… 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.”

Apple’s “Think Different” campaign was designed to honor those people who have changed the world. And as Jobs so eloquently put it:

“Some of them are living. Some of them are not. But the ones that aren’t, you’ll know that if they ever used a computer, it would’ve been a Mac. The theme of the campaign is ‘Think Different.’ It’s 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.”

If you’re looking to create a great brand, I’d start out by asking: what are your core values and what does your company honor?