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