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Think Different: The Gamble That Rebuilt Apple's Soul
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
In 1997, with Apple's stock below $4 and its identity in ruins, Steve Jobs bet what was left of the company on an ad campaign that showed no products. This is the inside story of how 'Think Different' became one of the most consequential marketing decisions in American history.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
The year is nineteen ninety-seven. Apple's share price is sitting below four dollars.
To understand what "Think Different" meant, you have to understand exactly how bad things had become. We covered Jobs' return in an earlier episode.
Jobs worked directly with Lee Clow, the creative director at TBWA/Chiat/Day who had originally shepherded the iconic nineteen eighty-four commercial. That campaign had introduced the Macintosh with a single cinematic television spot.
There's a detail worth pausing on. "Think Different" is, grammatically, incorrect. You think differently.
Here's the key point that often gets lost in how this campaign is remembered. It was a genuine gamble.
Brand campaigns are notoriously difficult to measure. Sales data doesn't always map cleanly onto advertising spend, and there are always multiple variables at play.
The deeper significance of the campaign sits in what it reveals about how Jobs understood the relationship between brand and product. Most technology companies at the time, and many still today, lead with specifications.
Lee Clow's role in this story doesn't get enough attention. He was the creative force who had been with Apple since the nineteen eighty-four commercial, and his relationship with Jobs was one of genuine mutual respect.
"Think Different" ran as a primary campaign through roughly two thousand. By then, Apple had shipped the iMac, released the first version of OS X in development, and was beginning to think seriously about the music market that would eventually produce the iPod.
When people talk about advertising as a business tool, they usually mean driving short-term purchase behavior. Awareness, conversion, sales.
Chapter summary auto-generated from the verified script. Listen to the full episode for the complete content.