Even if Apple were to drop the “i”, it wouldn’t be the company’s most important change. Segal noted that the company is no stranger to overhauls and believes Apple CEO Tim Cook won’t lose any sleep over removing the Jobs-era prefix. Apple did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
“Apple has done some incredibly bold, reckless, and dangerous things in the past,” Segal said. “Every time there was a processor change or an OS change, the experts were like, ‘What, for real?’ Are we going to rebuild the operating system or move to a completely new hardware platform? Are you going to migrate? But Apple did it.”
He noted that today’s Apple is much larger than the Jobs-era Apple, with more cash at stake and more jobs at stake, so it may be more risk-averse. I admit it. But the company still wants to be known as an innovator, and sticking to product names just for brand equity reasons isn’t very Apple-like.
“Think Different” is Apple’s legendary 1997 Emmy Award-winning ad campaign created by Segal. He brought together pre-Apple geniuses, from Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Martin Luther King Jr. to Mahatma Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, and other “misfits, rebels, and troublemakers.” co-wrote the copy for a 60-second television ad. He warns that “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who can change the world.”
This campaign was an ongoing one. Apple had no new products to sell, and as Jobs liked to tell people then and since, the company was 90 days away from bankruptcy and his return to the company he co-founded in 1976. posed a considerable risk to investors.
Macman iMac
.jpg)
The Think Different campaign improved Apple’s brand awareness, but it took the launch and massive sales of the iMac in 1998 to transform the company’s profitability. This chunk of “Bondi Blue” was the difference between winning and losing for Apple, and Jobs made no secret of this fact from outside advertising agency TBWA\Chiat\Day.
This relatively inexpensive consumer computer, originally codenamed C1, was intended to be a machine that could be easily connected to the Internet. Although this connection is ubiquitous today, it was rare in the 1990s. The iMac was bright, fun, easy to use, and a huge success, setting Apple on the path to becoming a behemoth and, in 2011, the richest company in the world. (Earlier this year, Apple was overtaken by Microsoft as the largest global company in the market.) Capitalize. )
Weeks after its release, the original iMac still didn’t have an official name. Apple’s internal marketing and product teams tried out “Rocket Mac,” “EveryMac,” and “Maxter,” before favoring “MacMan,” a play on the Walkman, the influential and best-selling portable audio player manufactured and sold by Sony in 1979.
“[Jobs]liked the MacMan’s resemblance to the Walkman, which at the time was the most famous and profitable electronic device in the world,” Segal said.
“He was happy with the association. He told the marketing team that Sony was a very successful consumer electronics company and that Apple might want to be one day, too, and that they hired MacMan. He said that even if he felt a little bad about it, that’s okay.” Mr. Segal agrees that this does not mean that Jobs has a “different way of thinking.”
