Inside Steve's Brain - Leander Kahney [46]
The importance of advertising to Jobs is clearly illustrated by his choice of CEO to run Apple in its early days: John Sculley, a marketing executive from PepsiCo who had used advertising to build Pepsi into a Fortune 500 company. At the time, Apple was one of America’s fastest-growing companies, but it needed an experienced executive to manage growth. Just twenty-six, Jobs was judged by Apple’s board to be too young and inexperienced to handle the job himself, so he was tasked with finding a CEO to run the company. Jobs spent many months finding an older executive he could work with.
He chose Sculley, the thirty-eight-year-old president of PepsiCo, who’d masterminded the “Pepsi Generation” advertising campaign, which helped unseat Coke as the number-one brand for the first time in its history. Jobs spent several months courting Sculley, an experienced executive and a marketer extraordinaire, to run the company.
During the “Cola Wars” of the seventies, Sculley massively boosted Pepsi’s market share by spending huge sums of cash on savvy TV advertising. Expensive, slick campaigns like the “Pepsi Challenge” transformed Pepsi from an underdog into a soda giant on equal footing with Coca-Cola. Jobs wanted Sculley to apply the same advertising chops to the fledgling market for personal computers. Jobs was especially worried about the Macintosh, which would debut in a few months. He felt that advertising would be one of the major factors in its success. He wanted the Mac to appeal to the general public—not just electronics freaks—and effectively advertising a weird and unfamiliar new product would be key to achieving that. Sculley had no technology experience whatsoever, but it didn’t matter. Jobs wanted his marketing expertise. Jobs wanted to create, in his own words, an “Apple Generation.”
Sculley ran Apple in partnership with Jobs. He became Jobs’s mentor and teacher, applying his marketing expertise to the nascent but swiftly growing PC market. Sculley and Jobs’s strategy at Apple was to build sales rapidly and then out-advertise the competition. “Apple hadn’t yet realized that as a billion-dollar corporation it had immense advantages we hadn’t exploited,” Sculley wrote in his autobiography, Odyssey. “It’s almost impossible for a company with sales of $50 million or even $200 million to invest in the kinds of effective television advertising campaigns you need if you’re going to leave any impression at all.”20
Jobs and Sculley immediately boosted Apple’s advertising budget from $15 million to $100 million. Sculley said their goal was to make Apple “first and foremost a product marketing company.” Many critics have dismissed Apple’s advertising flair, rejecting it as trivial and unimportant. Pure flash; no substance. But at Apple, marketing has always been one of its key strategies. The company has used advertising as an extremely important and effective way to distinguish itself from the competition. “Steve and I were convinced we had the secret formula—a combination of revolutionary technology and marketing,” wrote Sculley.21
Sculley’s ideas have been very influential on Jobs, laying the groundwork for many of Jobs’s marketing techniques at Apple today.
At PepsiCo, Sculley was responsible for some of the earliest and most successful examples of lifestyle advertising—emotionally charged spots that tried to reach people’s minds through their hearts. Rather than try to market specific attributes of Pepsi over other sodas, which were negligible, Sculley created advertising that articulated an “enviable lifestyle.”
To that end, Sculley’s “Pepsi Generation” ads featured wholesome American kids engaged in idealized leisure pursuits: playing with puppies in a field or eating watermelon at a picnic. The Pepsi ads portrayed uncomplicated vignettes of life’s magic moments, set in a mythical middle America. They were designed to appeal to baby boomers—the fastest-growing, wealthiest consumers in the post-World War II economy—by portraying a lifestyle they’d aspire to. They