Apple has made some excellent business decisions over the last few years. Just as Napster was taken down by the courts, Apple provided a legal alternative with iTunes, revolutionizing the way people buy music. The iPod helped bring about the MP3 player revolution and rendered the Compact Disc obsolete. Switching to Intel processors made it possible to dual boot between the Mac OS and Windows, making it possible to finally have it all: a computer that’s a PC and a Mac. Yes, Apple has had some great ideas over the past few years, but lots of great ideas have failed to catch on. A huge part of Apple’s success is that they finally came up with a competent marketing campaign.
In the past, Apple did a great job of conquering the market for graphic professionals but, for most of my life, the only people I knew who owned Macs were my teachers at high school. Apple appealed to the intelligentsia with campaigns like “Think Different”, which suggested that the revolutionary thinkers of the 20th Century would use Macs.
I remember seeing posters featuring Gandhi and Einstein in my high school. I can say with absolute assurance that Gandhi would never have used a Mac. Gandhi treasured Indian traditions and famously made his own clothes with a spinning wheel (which is visible in the left side of the picture). He used technology as little as possible. Now, I know, Apple wasn’t actually saying that Gandhi would have been a Mac user, only that he was a person who thought differently. Still, I found it offensive to use Gandhi’s image to promote their products.
I might be alone in being offended by the inclusion of Gandhi in the campaign, but Gandhi is a personal hero of mine. There was a lot of potential for backlash from this campaign, if you think about it. Jim Henson was a beloved children’s entertainer who died too young. Amelia Earhart died during her attempt to think differently, and Martin Luther King and Gandhi were assassinated for thinking differently. Did no one think that maybe it was in poor taste to use people who were murdered in their ads? Why didn’t they include JFK, or did they realize that that one might cause too much outrage?
At any rate, these ads never stood a chance of appealing to young people. They’re too high brow, too obscure, and too out of touch with my generation. This kind of marketing is exactly why the only people using Macs were hippies and teachers.
Then, one day, I saw this ad on television.
Walkie Talkie Man was a great choice for the song. Between 0:17 and 0:21, when multiple copies of the dancing girl spin around her while she does the helicopter hair thing, I was thinking, “This is the best ad ever!” For the first time ever, Apple was cool.
Apple is finally marketing to regular people, and it turns out the 99% of the world that they had ignored for decades had quite a lot of money. It seems obvious, but Apple has finally figured out that it isn’t good enough to just be different and market your products to people who think differently. You have to make products that appeal to everyone and market them to everyone. Duh!
