Think different

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Apple Logo Think different

Think different was the slogan of an Apple advertising campaign from 1997 that was created by Peter Economides at the TBWA Los Angeles office of advertising agency . The campaign included a well-known commercial , various publications in print media and in television advertising . The campaign ran until 2002.

Think different

The central text of the campaign read:

English version German version
Here's to the crazy ones.
The misfits.
The rebels.
The troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently.
They're not fund of rules.
And they have no respect for the status quo .
You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
But the only thing you can't do is ignore them.
Because they change things.
They push the human race forward.
And while some may see them as the crazy ones,
We see genius.
Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world,
Are the ones who do.
To everyone who thinks differently:
The rebels,
the idealists,
the visionaries,
the lateral thinkers,
those who cannot be squeezed into any scheme,
those who see things differently.
They don't bow to any rules
and they have no respect for the status quo.
We can quote them, contradict them, admire them or reject them.
The only thing we can't do is ignore them
because they change things
because they advance humanity.
And while some think they're crazy
we see geniuses in them.
'Cause those who are crazy enough to think
they could change the world
are the ones that do.

background

Competitor IBM advertised its personal computers with the slogan “Think!”, Which was originally coined by former IBM CEO Thomas J. Watson around 1910 while working for the National Cash Register Company (NCR) .

The statement "Think different" is seen by many, including native speakers, as grammatically incorrect - as an imperative with an adverb it should be "think differently". What is meant here, however, is "Think different" in a similar way to "Think victory" or "Think profit", which are followed by a noun, as Steve Jobs emphasizes in his biography. Translated into German it means “think differently” and not, as suspected, “think differently”. For Steve Jobs the difference was significant - the campaign ties in with the counterculture motif from Apple's early days.

Creation of the advertising campaign

TBWA had already created the well-known commercial "1984" for Apple, with which the Macintosh was introduced. After Steve Jobs' temporary resignation in 1985 until his return in December 1996, TBWA had not received any orders from Apple.

On August 3, 1997, TBWA presented the draft of the Think-Different-Campaign Jobs, in which originally employees of Dreamworks should be shown how they work on their Macs. Jobs suggested using black and white portraits of well-known personalities instead of employees. Jobs personally made sure that personalities like Joan Baez , an ex-girlfriend of Jobs, or Yoko Ono , a former neighbor of Jobs, consented to the use of their portraits in this advertising campaign and that Richard Dreyfuss spoke the text. Jobs also suggested that the advertised product should not appear throughout the advertising campaign.

As part of the campaign, television commercials , posters and publications in print media were produced, which showed the following people, among others: Albert Einstein , Bob Dylan , Martin Luther King, Jr. , Richard Branson , Miles Davis , John Lennon , Richard Buckminster Fuller , Thomas Edison , Muhammad Ali , Ted Turner , Maria Callas , Mahatma Gandhi , Amelia Earhart , Alfred Hitchcock , Martha Graham , Jim Henson (with Kermit ), Jerry Seinfeld (in an abridged version for the Finale of the Seinfeld series ), Frank Lloyd Wright and Pablo Picasso .

Later use

The slogan “Think different” was used again and again even after the end of the Apple advertising campaign.

Honors on "apple.com"

Apple honored personalities who were not originally part of the campaign on their homepage in the style of “Think Different”. In detail these were:

Others

  • The English version of the text of the campaign can be recognized in the high-resolution program icon of TextEdit from Mac OS X Leopard to OS X Mavericks . The only difference is that here the text was formulated as a letter from a John Appleseed to an unspecified Kate.
  • In 2009 Apple printed the slogan on the packaging of the new 21.5 ″ and 27 ″ iMacs and extended the copyright to the “Think different” word mark. Previously, Apple had printed the URL of their website here under the list of technical data .
  • Later on, images kept appearing on the Internet that reverse advertising with black humor, such as images of Adolf Hitler with an Apple logo and the slogan “Think different”.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs. Simon & Schuster, New York 2011, ISBN 978-1-4516-4853-9 , p. 329 f.
  2. ^ 'Think Different': The Ad Campaign that Restored Apple's Reputation .
  3. ↑ http://www.mactechnews.de/gallery/picture/das-nenn-ich-ma-think-different-51410.html