Kamal Ghorui
Apple founder Steve Jobs reportedly learnt his most important marketing lesson came from Nike. In 1997, when Steve Jobs made his dramatic return to Apple (after having been fired in 1985), one of his top priorities is said to be reinvigorating not just the company’s products, but also Apple’s brand’s image. Talking to employees during a town hall, Jobs said that the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect. Jobs said, “We need to bring it back.” For inspiration, he turned to Nike.This 1997 staff meeting was where Steve Jobs revealed how he was about to save Apple from bankruptcy: “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.”Steve continues: “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.”He gave the example of Nike. “The best example of all, and one of the greatest jobs of marketing the universe has ever seen is Nike,” Jobs explained. “Remember, 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, they don’t ever talk about their products. They don’t ever tell you about their air soles and why they’re better than Reebok’s air soles. What does Nike do? They honor great athletes and they honor great athletics. That’s who they are, that’s what they are about.”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.”Jobs concluded, “Those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do.”Talking about the ad to Walter Isaacson for his biography, Jobs “This wasn’t about processor speed or memory, it was about creativity.”
Steve Job’s advice to Nike CEO
While Steve Jobs’ was a huge admirer of Nike’s ad campaign, the admiration was kinda mutual. When Nike named Mark Parker its CEO in 2006, one of the first things Parker reportedly did was call Apple CEO Steve Jobs for advice. Talking about the advice Jobs gave him, Parker told in an interview ten years later, Steve Jobs said one thing that stuck with me: “Nike makes some of the best products in the world. Products that you lust after. But you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.” “He was absolutely right,” said Parker. “We had to edit.”
