What Apple Knows About Selling That Most Businesses Don't

In 1997, Apple was 90 days from bankruptcy.

Microsoft was winning. Everyone knew it. The company that once defined personal computing was bleeding money, losing market share, and running out of time.

Then Steve Jobs came back.

His first move wasn't fixing the product line. Wasn't cutting costs. Wasn't hiring better engineers. He launched a $100 million ad campaign. For a company with no good products to sell.

The ads showed black and white photos. Einstein. Martin Luther King Jr. John Lennon. Muhammad Ali. Gandhi. No computers anywhere. No features. No prices. Just rebels who changed the world, with Apple's logo in the corner.

Two words: Think Different.

Wall Street thought he'd lost his mind. You're broke and you're spending $100 million on ads that don't even show the product?

Within two years, Apple went from near death to one of the most valuable brands on the planet.

What did Jobs see that everyone else missed?

The identity game

Here's a question most businesses never ask: when someone buys your product, who do they become?

Not what do they get. Who do they become.

When you buy an iPhone, you're not really buying a phone. You're buying membership. Creative people use iPhones. Designers. Photographers. People who care about aesthetics. People who "think different."

That's not an accident. That's the entire strategy.

Jobs laid it out in a 1997 internal meeting, right before the Think Different launch: "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. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us."

Notice what he didn't say. He didn't say "we have to be clear about our specs." He said values.

Nike got this early. Jobs talked about them constantly. "Nike sells a commodity. Shoes. And yet when you think of Nike, you feel something different than a shoe company. In their ads, they don't ever talk about their air soles and why they're better than Reebok's. They honor great athletes. They honor great athletics. That's who they are."

Apple took that playbook and ran with it.

Go look at their website right now

Seriously. Open another tab. Go to apple.com and look at how they describe the iPhone.

No spec sheet above the fold. No processor speeds. No RAM comparisons. Just beautiful images and a headline: "iPhone 15 Pro. Titanium. So strong. So light. So Pro."

That's the pitch for a $1,200 phone. Twelve hundred dollars and they're not even trying to justify it with logic.

Because they understand something that most businesses don't: we make decisions emotionally, then justify them rationally. If you try to win someone with logic before you've captured them emotionally, you've already lost.

The specs exist. Scroll far enough and you'll find them. But by the time you get there, you've already decided you want it. The specs just give you permission to buy something your gut already chose.

Compare that to literally any other tech company's website. Samsung hits you with comparison charts. Dell drowns you in configuration options. HP wants you to understand the difference between their seventeen laptop lines.

Apple shows you a pretty picture and makes you feel something. Then they take your money.

The $50 million box

Here's a story that says everything about how Apple thinks.

When they were designing the original iPhone packaging, Steve Jobs made the team create dozens of prototypes. Not for the phone. For the box.

He wanted opening an iPhone to feel like a ritual. The slow slide of the lid. The satisfying resistance. The way the phone sits perfectly in its tray, revealed like a piece of jewelry. Even the smell.

They spent months on this. Months. On a box that people throw away.

A former Apple designer said Jobs believed the unboxing experience set the tone for everything that followed. If opening the box felt premium, you'd perceive the product as premium. You'd forgive small flaws. You'd feel good about spending the money.

Most companies see packaging as a cost to minimize. Apple sees it as the first note in a symphony.

That philosophy scales to everything they do. The weight of a laptop. The click of a keyboard. The satisfying snap of an AirPods case. None of it is random. All of it is engineered to make you feel something.

A thousand small moments of delight, stacked on top of each other.

The religion business

In 2011, a neuroscience study scanned the brains of Apple fans while they looked at Apple products. The researchers found that the images triggered activity in the same regions associated with religious devotion.

That sounds like a joke. It's not.

People line up for days to buy a new iPhone. They argue with strangers defending a corporation. They put Apple stickers on their cars. They feel personally attacked when someone criticizes the brand.

Jobs studied this. He looked at what made people fanatically loyal to religions and cults and political movements. And he reverse-engineered it.

Exclusivity. The higher price isn't a bug, it's the point. You're not buying the cheap option. You're buying your way into something elite.

Shared identity. Blue iMessage bubbles vs green text messages. AirPods in every ear on the subway. The glowing Apple logo in every coffee shop. Owning the products signals tribal membership.

Common enemies. First IBM, then Microsoft. The "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" campaign made it explicit. We're the cool ones. They're the boring ones. Pick a side.

The keynote is a cultural event. The launch day lines. The annual upgrade cycle. These create shared experiences that bind the community together.

Jobs didn't invent this. But he might have executed it better than anyone in business history.

The trap

Let's talk about something Apple doesn't put in their ads.

Once you're in, getting out is hard.

Your photos are in iCloud. Your messages are in iMessage. Your apps are tied to your Apple ID. Your watch only works with iPhone. Your AirPods work better with Apple than with anything else. Your laptop syncs perfectly with your tablet.

Every Apple product makes every other Apple product more valuable. And every Apple product makes non-Apple products feel broken.

Consider what happens if you want to switch to Android. You don't just lose a phone. You lose access to years of photos, thousands of messages, hundreds of dollars in apps. You have to rebuild your entire digital life.

Most people look at that and decide it's not worth it.

From the customer's perspective, this feels like convenience. And it is convenient. But it's also a smart trap.

The more Apple products you own, the more expensive it becomes to leave.

That's not an accident.

The pricing psychology

Here's where Apple really breaks the rules.

Every business school teaches that competition drives prices down. When your competitor lowers their price, you have to match it or explain why you're worth more.

Apple ignores this completely.

When Android phones race to the bottom, Apple stays premium. When the market pushes toward commoditization, Apple pushes toward luxury. The iPhone has never been the cheapest option. Not once.

And it works. Apple has roughly 25% of the global smartphone market but captures over 80% of the profits.

Why? Because price itself is a signal.

When something costs more, we assume it's better. We value it more. We take better care of it. The high price creates a perception of quality that a lower price would destroy.

But there's something deeper going on. Apple products aren't just expensive. They're visibly expensive. Everyone knows what an iPhone costs. And that visibility is part of the value.

Owning an iPhone tells other people something about you. That you can afford it. That you prioritize quality. That you're part of the tribe.

Apple isn't just selling a phone. They're selling the status that comes with owning it.

What this actually means for you

You're could become the next Apple. But they're a $3 trillion company with decades of brand equity and a very strong following.

But the principles work at any scale.

Most businesses compete on features. They list everything their product does and hope customers will be impressed. This doesn't work because customers don't buy features. They buy identity. They buy feelings. They buy status.

Ask yourself: when someone buys from you, who do they become? What are they joining? What does it say about them?

Everything communicates. Your website. Your proposals. Your invoices. Your email signature. Your hold music. All of it either reinforces that you're premium or undermines it.

Charge what you're worth. Underpricing signals a lack of confidence. It attracts customers who value cheap over good. Premium pricing, backed by a premium experience, attracts customers who will value what you do.

What we do with this

We study this stuff ALOT.

Apple. Nike. Porsche. Patagonia. Airbnb. Every brand that's ever made people feel something before they understood why.
We tear them apart. We figure out what they did. We figure out why it worked. Then we figure out how to use it.

It's the whole Soar culture. All 30+ creatives on the Soar Agency team run on this. Designers, copywriters, developers, strategists. Even our sales team thinks in these frameworks. When you're in a room with us, you're in a room with people who are genuinely obsessed with what makes brands become movements.

If you're ready to build a brand that belongs next to the greats, book a call with one of our creatives.

Let's build something people actually remember.