Steve Jobs holding a small staff meeting in Sept 23, 1997
Transcript
Machine transcript in the original language. It may contain errors. Select a timestamp to play that moment.
Good morning.
We were up until 3 o'clock last night finishing this advertising up,
and I want to show it to you in a minute, see what you think of it.
I've been back about 8 to 10 weeks, and we've been working really hard.
and what we're trying to do is not something really highfalutin.
We're trying to get back to the basics.
We're trying to get back to the basics of great products, great marketing, and great distribution.
And I think that Apple has pockets of greatness,
but in some ways has drifted away from doing the basics really well.
So we started with the product line.
We looked at the product roadmap going out for a few years, and we said a lot of this doesn't make sense, and it's way too much stuff, and there's not enough focus.
And so we actually got rid of 70% of the stuff on the product roadmap.
I mean, I couldn't even figure out the damn product line after a few weeks.
I kept saying, well, what is this model?
How does this fit?
And I started talking to customers, and they couldn't figure it out either.
And so you're going to see the product line get much simpler,
and you're going to see the product line get much better.
And there's some new stuff coming out that's incredibly nice.
In addition, we've been able to focus a lot more on the 30% of the gems
and add some new stuff in that is going to take us in some whole new directions.
So we are incredibly excited about the products.
and I think we're really thinking differently
about the kinds of products we have to build
and the engineering team is incredibly excited
I mean I came out of the meeting with people
that had just gotten their projects canceled
and they were three feet off the ground with excitement
because they finally understood where in the heck we were going
and they were really excited about the strategy
in the same way we I think have not been as
We have not kept up with innovations in our distribution.
I'll give you an example.
I'm sure it was talked about this morning,
but we've got anywhere from two to three months of inventory
in our manufacturing supplier pipeline
and about an equal amount in our distribution channel pipeline.
So we're having to make guesses four, five, six months in advance
about what the customer wants, and we're not smart enough to do that.
I don't think Einstein's smart enough to do that.
So what we're going to do is get really simple
and start taking inventory out of those pipelines
So we can let the customer tell us what they want and we can respond to it super fast.
And you're going to see us be doing a lot of things like that.
Today is just the first of many things we're going to be doing with you.
So we're going to be not only, I think, catching up to where the best of the best are in distribution,
but we're going to actually be innovating and be breaking some new ground, I think, in the coming several months.
And I'm pretty excited about that as well in the distribution manufacturing side of things.
and that gets us to the marketing side of things.
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 20 years to convince you that milk was good for you.
It's a lie, but they tried anyway.
And the sales were going like this.
And then they tried Got Milk, and the sales have gone like this.
Got Milk doesn't even talk about the product.
Matter of fact, it focuses on the absence of the product.
But the best example of all
and one of the greatest jobs of marketing
in 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 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 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.
You'd never know it.
So when I got here, Apple just fired their agency.
They were doing a competition with 23 agencies that, you know, four years from now would have picked one.
And we blew that up, and we hired Shite, the ad agency that I was fortunate enough to work with years ago.
We created some award-winning work, including the commercial voted the best ad ever made in 1984 by advertising professionals.
And we started working about eight weeks ago.
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 fit 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's 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 we've had the opportunity to work with people like that.
We've had an opportunity to work with people like you,
with software developers, with customers who have done it in some big and some small ways.
And we believe that in this world.
People can change it for the better.
And that those people that 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's a totally different place than it was a decade ago.
And Apple's totally different.
And Apple's place in it is totally different.
And believe me, the products and the distribution strategy and the manufacturing are totally different.
And we understand that.
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.