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.

Now, Apple—fortunately—is one of the half a dozen best brands in the whole world. Right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke, Sony. It is one of the greats of the greats. Not just in this country, but all around the globe. But even a great brand needs investment and caring if it’s going to retain its relevance and vitality, and the Apple brand has clearly suffered from neglect in this area in the last few years. And we need to bring it back. 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. The dairy industry tried for twenty years to convince you that milk was good for you. It’s a lie, but they tried anyway. [Audience laughs.] And the sales have gone like this [down], and then they tried “Got milk?” and the sales have gone like this [up]. “Got Milk?” doesn’t even talk about the price—matter of fact the focus is on the absence of the price.

But the best example of all, and one of the greatest jobs of marketing that the universe has ever seen, is Nike. 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, as you know, they don’t ever talk about the price. They don’t ever tell you about their air soles and why they’re better than Reebok’s air soles. 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 spends a fortune on advertising. You’d never know it. . . . So, when I got here, Apple [had] just fired their agency and was in a competition with twenty-three agencies that, you know, four years from now they’d pick one. And we blew that up and we hired Chiat/Day, the ad agency that I was fortunate enough to work with years ago, who created some award-winning work, including the commercial voted the best ad ever made, 1984, by advertising professionals.

And we started working with that agency again, and the question we asked was: Our customers want to know, “Who is Apple, and what is it that we stand for? Where do we sit in this world?” And 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 in some cases. But Apple is about something more than that. 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. . . . And that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do.

And so what we’re going to do in our first brand marketing campaign in several years is to get back to that core value. A lot of things have changed. The market is a totally different place from what it was a decade ago. And Apple is totally different, and Apple’s place in it is totally different. . . . But values—and core values—those things shouldn’t change. The things that Apple believes in at its core are the same things that Apple really stands for today.

Ken Segall • Insanely Simple