How a Nike lesson helped Steve Jobs revive Apple’s brand

When Steve Jobs walked back into Apple in 1997, he was not returning to the same company he had left over a decade earlier. Once a symbol of innovation and rebellion in the computer industry, Apple had become a shadow of itself, a company with uninspired products, falling sales and an identity crisis.

Jobs saw it differently. The problem, he believed, was not just technological stagnation but a loss of meaning.

Apple no longer stood for anything. “We need to bring it back,” he told employees at a company town hall that year, a meeting that would mark the start of Apple’s remarkable transformation from near bankruptcy to global icon.

Steve Jobs’ Nike inspiration

In that 1997 meeting, Jobs delivered what would become one of his most influential internal speeches. “In a very noisy world, no one is going to remember much about us,” he said, urging his team to look beyond technical details and rival comparisons. Marketing, he insisted, was about values, the emotional core that made people care.

Jobs drew his inspiration from Nike, which he described as one of the greatest examples of marketing ever created. Nike sold shoes, a commodity, he noted, yet its advertisements rarely discussed materials or design. “They honour great athletes and the spirit of sport,” Jobs explained. “That’s what Nike is about.”

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It was a profound shift in perspective. For Jobs, Nike’s genius lay in understanding that consumers weren’t buying footwear; they were buying a story, one of ambition, resilience and human potential. Apple, he decided, would need to tell its own story just as powerfully.

Jobs’ admiration for Nike went beyond inspiration, it evolved into mutual respect. When Mark Parker took over as CEO of Nike in 2006, he reached out to Jobs for advice. Jobs’ response was characteristically direct. “You make some of the best products in the world,” he told Parker, “but you also make a lot of crap. Just get rid of the crappy stuff and focus on the good stuff.”

Parker later admitted that the advice, though blunt, was transformative, and very much in line with how Jobs rebuilt Apple. It reflected the same principle that had guided Apple’s turnaround: clarity, focus and a commitment to excellence.

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Jobs’ philosophy, captured later in Steve Jobs, was that Apple’s revival was never about specs or performance metrics. It was about creativity, belief and purpose. He saw Apple not as a company that made machines, but as a movement that empowered individuals to think differently.

Apple under Steve Jobs

Nearly three decades later, that 1997 moment still stands as a defining pivot in Apple’s history. Jobs’ decision to shift the conversation from what Apple makes to what Apple believes in changed everything, from product design to advertising and customer loyalty.

Under his leadership, Apple stopped being just a computer manufacturer and became a cultural symbol of imagination and possibility. The company’s story, much like Nike’s, became less about products and more about people who dared to dream.

The lesson Jobs borrowed from Nike remains timeless: great brands don’t just sell products; they sell belief. And in rediscovering that truth, he didn’t just save Apple, he redefined the art of modern marketing.