The IC3 Blue Train - A little journal about design, marketing, sales and other matters

Random Chronicles #1 – Apple Europe, 1981

Is there anything like a global market that can be addressed with a single message?

In ‘Wings for the Mind’, I suggest extensions to the original paradigm that Apple created in the early 1980s and briefly describe how the “wheels for the mind” tagline was publicised in Europe.

“As part of the team that created Apple Computer Europe in the early 1980s, I had the privilege to witness the results of an ad campaign we ran in Europe’s main business newspapers. The ad featured a picture of a bicycle illustrating the concept of “wheels for the mind” that Apple was using in 1981 to explain the benefits of a personal computer (the Apple II). The analogy was quite powerful … and successful.

If you live in the middle of nowhere, in a house providing shelter and food, and if you have a bicycle, you can, in one day, explore more territory around the house than if you do it on foot. With a computer, by analogy, you can analyse much more data within a given time, or handle a fixed amount of data much faster. So, the personal computer gives you ‘wheels for the mind’.”

The ad also featured the portrait of a young man, Steve Jobs, who was introduced to the Europeans as co-founder and general-in-chief of the fast growing company. As far as I can remember, here are the results, maybe a tad exaggerated, of the post-publishing survey we ran in the main European markets:

• The Brits, who were quite anti-American at that time, rejected the whole concept as a kind of Mickey Mouse baloney (Clive Sinclair’s ZX80 technological marvel was Britain’s personal computing flagship at that time;-)
• The Germans thought that the whole schmear was a pure lie: such a korporation couldn’t have been founded by such a young guy (and how could a serious computer have a plastic case and use a skimpy floppy disk as external storage)?
• The French liked the intellectual slant and quickly adopted the Apple II as smart product of the Silicon Valley (France quickly became Apple’s largest international market)
• The Italians loved the Apple as hot produce from sunny California (and some quickly saw the possibilities to manage three sets of accounts: for the taxman, for their wife, and the real ones;-)

This shows that even a new concept or technology doesn’t create a global, homogeneous market and that a generic product message has to be packaged and fine tuned differently for various cultures, doesn’t it?