Think DifferentOne of the first things that Steve Jobs did after taking over as Apple’s interim CEO in 1997 is to get Apple back on track with their branding. In this short presentation from ‘97, Jobs talks about branding & Apple’s core values and introduces the Think Different campaign.
[It] might be one of the best five minute explanations of good branding out there.
I wasn’t even a Mac user in ‘97 (I was all of 14) but I had a bunch of these “Think Different” posters on my wall. (I had the Miles Davis one taped to my piano.) Brilliant campaign.
Kottke makes a great point: notice how Apple shows nothing *but* the product in its current ads for the iPhone and iPad.
I wasn’t an Apple user then, either, but as a self-declared “platform agnostic” in 1997 I had Wired’s famous Pray cover hanging on my wall (amongst lots of other magazine cutouts and collage junk, granted). Journalists and disaffected users were piling on, and the company was expected to fold. It’s amazing to see how far things have shifted for Apple’s fortunes since that Wired article ran. Apple took a lot of the criticism and advice to heart, it seems. Here’s a relevant bit:
10. Get a great image campaign. Let’s get some branding (or rebranding) going on. Reproduce the “1984” spot with a 1997 accent.
(via austinkleon)
