tale of two commercials

Apple has visibly remained a powerful disruptive force in the tech industry that has maintained its market leadership for a significant period of time which is statistically uncharacteristic based on the history of past market leaders. While nearing a 4 trillion-dollar market capitalization (at the time of writing), Apple has been an outlier in terms of the free cash flow it generates and the disproportionately high profit margins it commands when benchmarked against competitors that sell products in the same category. The dominant position that Apple has accomplished and more importantly maintained as a business naturally brings about a deep sense of curiosity to understand the drivers that catapulted Apple into this state of dominance. While there are a multitude of drivers that can be gleaned from the various retrospective business case studies done on Apple and Steve Job’s detailed biography itself, majority of the drivers ultimately converge into appealing to the emotional side of the brain and cultivating a cult-like loyalty to the brand where consumers subconsciously enter into a state of delicious (voluntary) enslavement. Apple is undoubtedly a product-first company where there is an incessant focus on building superior products that truly solves requisite consumer needs and they have at times given birth to very disruptive products like the Macintosh computer (with an industry first GUI interface for personal computers) or iPhone (with an industry first touchscreen interface for mobile phones) that used radically different technology in order to best satiate these consumer needs. However, in spite of being a product-first company, Apple did not really focus on enumerating the various functionalities of its products in the primary messaging it relayed to the world. Invoking a cult-like loyalty requires more than just making consumers fall in love with the disruptive functionalities being built, because at the end of the day functionalities are ultimately commodities that can be eventually copied and quickly developed by competing businesses. Steve Jobs wanted the products under Apple’s hood to silently scream something more than the fact that it was merely just a tool to tackle certain functional requirements of consumers. Therefore, the process of marketing the products had to be radically different than the conventional approaches adopted in a tech-centered industry where businesses would typically try to outline various technical specifications of its products to a statistically large not-so-tech-understanding consumer base. This is where the story of two historic ad campaigns run by Apple at two pivotal timeframes of the company’s journey, come into the picture which looking back is still considered as nothing short of a stroke of genius in the world of marketing. While it is hard to retrospectively assess contributory causality of specific events in the larger picture of things, it can be argued that these two ad campaigns played a significantly large role in helping Apple achieve the unique positioning it has accomplished today as it sowed the early seeds of what Apple truly represented in the minds of consumers which was being more than just a business that sold computers. What truly intrigues me about the two historic ad campaigns (which I’m going to dive into later) is the meticulous and creative craftsmanship with which they were developed and (as you might have guessed it) they did not really talk about Apple products or the functionalities they were offering. So, what are these two ad campaigns I’m talking about and what makes them so special? Let’s dive into it.

Circle back to 1984, the computer industry was about to witness a disruptive innovation that was a radically new proposition from its predecessors- Apple’s Macintosh. Computers until then used something known as a Command User Interface (CUI) which involved interacting with computers only through command prompts entered on a keyboard which was very unintuitive and tedious as users were required to remember a large number of specific text inputs in order to effectively use a computer. What made Apple’s Macintosh so different was it adopted an entirely new interface known as Graphical User Interface (GUI) which represents the type of computers we use today i.e. a computer with a desktop and mouse. Apple extracted the GUI technology from the labs of XEROX PARC and decided to immediately commercialize on it. At the time, IBM was the market leader in personal computers and Apple was the upstart trying to take IBM’s place on the throne. Apple’s cash cow at the time was its Apple II - a CUI-based personal computer that sold really well but Steve Jobs yearned for a disruptive change and wanted to bet the entire future of Apple on the GUI-based Macintosh which he believed would be the future of computing. Following a tumultuous development process for the engineers at Apple, the Macintosh was finally ready to be unveiled to the world on January 24, 1984. Although Apple was founded in 1976, they had not launched any major ad campaigns for its products prior to 1984 even though it had built and successfully shipped 3 product lines (Apple I, Apple II, Lisa). But for the Macintosh it was different, prior to the launch Jobs wanted to broadcast a message to the world that would philosophically signal the spirit embodied by an innovation like Macintosh and what it meant for the future of humanity. Jobs turned to creative director Lee Clow of the advertising agency Chiat/Day to help him in crafting the message he wished to relay to the world. 1984 had a certain other significance apart from being the year of the Macintosh launch, it was the title of a very popular fictional novel at the time, authored by George Orwell. The book ‘1984’ was published in 1949 and it outlined a dystopian outlook of the future i.e. in the year 1984 where the world is a totalitarian state ruled by a ruthless dictator called the ‘Big Brother’ that forced his subjects into a life of thoughtless conformity and submissiveness. The genius in the ad campaign that preceded the Macintosh launch in 1984 was that it brilliantly played with the central theme of the acclaimed George Orwell novel. The ad campaign which was first aired during the Superbowl - a popular sports event among Americans that commands an enormous viewership, took the entire world by storm. The ad simulated the dystopian world illustrated in the ‘1984’ novel, which showcases the thoughtless subjects listening to a mind-controlling speech given by the ‘Big Brother’ on a large screen, to mold them into unintellectual submission. Then comes a young rebellious woman with a sledgehammer in her hand, outrunning the ‘thought’ police of the Orwellian dystopia, who then in an act of rebellion against the dictatorship, flings the sledgehammer into the large screen displaying the Big Brother’s speech. The screen displaying the ‘Big Brother’ vaporizes following which the crux of the ad campaign is played - an announcement saying “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984”. While the content of the ad campaign was fictional and orders of magnitude away from true reality, it implied deep symbolism where the ‘Big Brother’ portrayed was attributed to IBM who was the dominant ‘dictator’ corporation of sorts at the time that sold unappealing products that put consumers into a state of thoughtless submission devoid of creativity. Apple, the upstart at the time was symbolized by the rebellious woman with the sledgehammer that was challenging the status quo created by IBM and the act of destroying the screen as an act of rebellion against the ‘Big Brother’ symbolized the launch of the Macintosh which would trigger a new revolution in the computer industry and displace IBM from its dominant ‘Big Brother’ position which is why the actual 1984 wouldn’t be like the Orwellian 1984 in the novel. This ad campaign tried to position Apple as a creative rebel that challenged dominion and yearned for freedom which are emotions that humans naturally connect with. So, the idea of buying a Macintosh computer was being associated with the idea of liberation and becoming a bold individual that didn’t submit to conformity. While the Macintosh as a product did not perform very well as it was a little ahead of its time, the ad campaign around it sowed the seeds for something much larger in the minds of consumers which lingers even to this day i.e. a deep emotional connection with Apple and its products.

Now coming to the second ad campaign, let’s fast forward 13 years from the Macintosh launch to 1997. In the course of these 13 years, a lot of events had unfolded - the Macintosh with all the hype around it turned out to be an unsuccessful product, tensions grew between Steve Jobs and the Apple management which eventually led to his ouster from the company, Jobs post his ouster started two companies Pixar and NeXT, Pixar as we know today turned out to be a very successful computerized animation production house responsible for beautiful masterpieces like the Toy Story franchise, NeXT which started out as a niche high-power computer manufacturer for educational institutions would end up pivoting to become a software company due to the unfavorable economics of its computers, Apple as a company severely deteriorated post the ouster of Jobs with the launch of many subpar products and poor financial performance, Apple in an interesting turn of events would end-up buying NeXT for its operating system thereby bringing Jobs back to the helm of Apple. This brings us now to 1997, which in retrospect was a very pivotal year in the history of Apple. On Job’s return, Apple was on the brink of bankruptcy which was a result of many poor strategic decisions made by the leaders of Apple that followed Jobs post his ouster from the company. The unique ethos with which Jobs and Wozniak had started Apple two decades earlier, was dead and many speculated including Jobs himself whether or not Apple could be saved from the dire state it was in. Jobs ended up taking very decisive steps in order to revive the soul of Apple as people once knew it to be - this involved reorganizing the company board, preventing the licensing of Apple operating system to clones i.e. the non-Apple computers which meant sacrificing a stream of revenue but this was something Jobs was adamant on as he believed in having end-to-end control over the products (both software and hardware) in order to deliver the best customer experience, slashing down 70% of existing product lines so as to redivert focus towards few key product lines and drive them towards excellence to help revive the product-first philosophy with which Apple had started out, and finally launching a new ad campaign that would send a message to the world similar to the one preceding the historic 1984 Macintosh launch. As done for the 1984 ad campaign, Jobs again turned to Lee Clow and Chiat/Day for their help to revive the broken image of Apple and restore Apple’s earlier ethos of creative rebellion. This led to the birth of the historic ‘Think Different’ ad campaign which like the 1984 ad campaign did not really try to talk about or describe an Apple product as such but was again a message to show the world the deep philosophical values that Apple stood for and reinvoke the emotional appeal that Apple had with its consumers. The ‘Think Different’ campaign which again was a stroke of genius, was centered around a beautiful poem that glorified rebels i.e. the ones who challenged the status quo as they are the ones who ultimately drive meaningful change in the world. The poem was voiced over a series of micro-clips of various global historic figures who had made a mark on the world of which some of the more noteworthy faces included Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Pablo Picasso, Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali and Richard Feynman. Apple, which was in a truly dire state at the time, took a very audacious step by associating itself with changemakers of the world to help cement the positioning it aspired to have in the minds of consumer i.e. of an innovator with the power to change the world. The ‘Think Different’ campaign thereby kickstarted what can now be recognized as one of the most historic business turnaround stories of the century with Apple then after swiftly leapfrogging past all other businesses (competitors and non-competitors alike) in terms of value generated.