Steve Jobs put it best of all when he explained how marketing was about values. You need to know:
- Who you are, and
- What you believe
When Jobs was launching the “Think Different” brand marketing campaign in 1997 he said,
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. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.
What is Nike doing in their advertising? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics.
That’s who they are, that’s what they are about.
Apple at the core – its core value is that we believe that people with passion can change the world for the better.
That’s what we believe.
But values and core values, those things shouldn’t change. The things that Apple believed in at its core are the same things that Apple really stands for today. And so we wanted to find a way to communicate this and what we have is something that I am very moved by it – it honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are living and some of them are not, but the ones that aren’t, as you’ll see, we know that if they’d ever used a computer it would have been a Mac.
Here is the short but powerful video launched as part of the “Think Different” brand marketing campaign.
Simon Sinek, in his book “Start With Why” advances the same hypothesis. That is, people do not buy what we sell, they buy why we sell it.
So, you start with why. Why do you do what you do?
Then you tell them how you do it.
Then you tell them who you are.
Most businesses get this arse about face and don’t start with why, they start with who they are and their product.
The next time you wonder about how Apple have such passionate, committed fans who are prepared to pay a premium price for products which are no better, and arguably worse, than those of competitors remember Jobs’ words.