When Steve Jobs told Apple employees: Nike sells shoes, but never talks about product

When Steve Jobs told Apple employees at a Town Hall: Nike sells shoes, but they never talk about …

Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997 after getting fired in 1985. After his return, the Apple founder then had reinventing the brand’s image as his key priority. Addressing Apple employees at a town hall then, Steve Jobs said the brand has suffered from neglect and “we need to bring it back”.

Jobs turned to Nike for inspiration. “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, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the product, they don’t ever talk about their air soles, how they’re better than Reebok’s air soles,” Steve Jobs said.“What’s Nike do in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics.

That is what they are about,” he added.

What Steve Jobs said Apple’s core values

Steve Jobs then went on to explain what Apple is really about, "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. But Apple is about something more than that. Apple, at its core value, is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.""To me, marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world.

It's a very noisy world. And 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."“The way to do that is not to talk about speeds and feeds. It's not to talk about MIPS and megahertz. It's not to talk about why we're better than Windows,” Steve Jobs continued.Jobs concluded, "Those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do."That was the core of Apple's “Think Different” ad campaign. It celebrated the creatives, or, as the famous television ad called them, the “crazy ones.”