Think Different: Apple spoke its values a year before it could prove them

In 1997 Apple was in deep trouble. It had lost more than a billion dollars over its fiscal year, its catalogue had sprawled into overlapping models that even its own salespeople struggled to tell apart, and much of the press was treating the company as finished. Steve Jobs came back through Apple’s purchase of NeXT at the end of 1996 and became interim CEO in September 1997. On September 28 the first spot of a new campaign aired, made with TBWA\Chiat\Day. “Think Different” showed black and white footage of Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Pablo Picasso, Amelia Earhart and others, over a text that opened with “Here’s to the crazy ones.” There was no computer on screen.

The products that would carry the message came later: the iMac in August 1998, the iPod in 2001. For about a year, Apple advertised a set of values that nothing on its shelves could yet demonstrate.

The first asset was already in the house

Talking to employees shortly before the launch, Jobs said: “To me, marketing is about values.” The method starts in the same place. Work on a value proposition begins with the values, before the product and before the competitors, and the values that hold up are the ones extracted from assets you truly own.

So it helps to ask what Apple still owned in 1997. The market share was shrinking and the product line was a liability. What remained was a relationship: designers, teachers, students and loyal users who had chosen Apple precisely because it stood apart from the beige office PC. That relationship was the asset. Think Different put a name on a value those customers already carried in their heads, and asked them to stay. Read this way, the campaign was an inventory of what had survived the decline, said out loud.

A company in a turnaround usually does the opposite. It talks about features, prices and roadmaps, which are exactly the things that are failing. Apple talked about the one thing that was still working.

A value that tells you what to stop

Values sit at the top of the governance ladder of a company: they limit the space of choice, and in exchange they give purpose. That limiting effect is easy to forget when values end up framed in a meeting room. At Apple in 1997 and 1998 it was visible. Jobs cut the catalogue down to a handful of machines, so each product had to carry the value on its own. The iMac’s translucent shell made “different” something you could see across a room.

This is the order we would point to. The value was declared first, and the internal decisions lined up behind it: what to make, what to kill, how a product should look on a desk. A value that removes options is doing its job, and a value that fits every possible decision gives the team nothing to work with.

Promising on credit

A campaign without a product is a promise waiting for its proof, and the space between the two is where trust breaks. Apple’s bet was defensible because of the height of the promise. On the Promise Ladder, Think Different sits at the rung of cultural resonance: the brand offered its customers a way to say who they were. A promise at that height can survive a short wait, because part of its proof is social: the people already using the product are the evidence. It cannot survive a long one. The iMac had to arrive looking like the campaign, and it had to sell. It sold well, and the credit was repaid.

The value as a reading lens

Think Different ran until around 2002. Afterwards Apple moved its weight from one value to the next over two decades: user experience, then privacy, then sustainability, one at a time. The method calls this the evolution of values. Values that customers once embraced stay with them as a reading lens even after the advertising stops, so the base reads each new move through the old affection. People who had signed up for “the crazy ones” read the iPod and the iPhone through that lens, and the brand felt consistent while the products changed completely.

If your company is in a difficult year, the first question is which value you will stand on and which asset it draws from, before any new product reaches the plan. That is the kind of upstream work described in what we do.