We&Co. is a new iPhone app that allows customers to rate specific employees within businesses. “Think of it as Yelp with considerably more granularity,” is John Biggs’s summation on TechCrunch.
What interests me about We&Co. is its tagline: “Thank Different.”
“Thank Different” is just one vowel away from Apple’s famous “Think Different” slogan, which was the theme of the ad campaign said to be responsible for Apple’s dramatic turnaround in the late 1990s. The “Think Different” ads, created by Los Angeles agency TBWA\Chiat\Day, featured black-and-white portraits of famous 20th-century people—the Dalai Lama, Jim Henson, Martha Graham, Miles Davis, and many others. The long version of the ad, created for TV spots, called these people “the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.”
Yoko Ono and John Lennon.
As a slogan, “Think Different” wasn’t terribly different. It riffed on two classics of the genre: Volkswagen’s “Think Small” (1960) and IBM’s “Think” (coined by Thomas J. Watson, Jr., in 1911—several years before he joined the forerunner of IBM).
Bill Bernbach, the ad man responsible for VW’s “Think Small” campaign.
Read more about these and other “Think” slogans in my May 2010 column for the Visual Thesaurus, “The Thinkers” (access now unrestricted). See also this March 2010 blog post, “Think Twice.”
But...but...I thought this was going to be a lesson on adverbs!
Posted by: Nancy Davis Kho | July 27, 2011 at 07:17 AM
@Nancy: "Different" isn't acting as a modifier here--it's serving the same noun-y function as "small" in "Think small" or "pink" in "Think pink."
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | July 27, 2011 at 07:27 AM