The Man Behind the Presentation
Before Apple had a product that most consumers could name, it had Regis McKenna. A Silicon Valley public relations strategist whose firm bore his name, McKenna was brought in during 1977 at Mike Markkula’s urging, when Apple Computer was still operating out of a small office in Cupertino and needed to look like something larger than it was. Jobs pursued McKenna personally after an initial rebuff, a persistence that McKenna later described in several interviews as characteristic of the young founder.
McKenna’s contribution operated on two levels. He placed Apple in front of journalists who shaped how the technology industry understood itself — Fortune, BusinessWeek, the emerging computing press — and he helped govern the visual language the company presented to those journalists. His agency worked alongside the designer who produced the rainbow logo, the multicoloured apple mark that ran from 1977 to 1998, advising on its placement and on the overall impression Apple’s materials should make. That impression was the subject of Mike Markkula’s 1977 Apple Marketing Philosophy memo, which introduced the word impute — the idea that people infer a product’s quality from every signal its packaging and presentation send. McKenna’s work was the practical execution of that principle.
Jobs spoke about McKenna in terms that were uncharacteristically direct for someone he collaborated with closely. In the 1995 Smithsonian oral history interview, preserved as a primary source by the Smithsonian Institution ↗, Jobs credited McKenna with understanding that Apple needed to be presented as a legitimate company before it fully was one — that the image had to precede the reality in order to attract the engineers, the retailers and the press the company required.
One specific decision illustrates the relationship’s texture. When Apple wanted to advertise in Playboy around the Apple II launch period, the choice was not obvious for a small California hardware company. McKenna’s counsel helped Jobs think through where the early-adopter, technically-curious male reader could be reached, and the Playboy buy proceeded. It was an early instance of Jobs and McKenna treating media placement as an argument about the audience rather than about the publication’s reputation.
Jobs spoke about McKenna in terms that were uncharacteristically direct for someone he collaborated with closely.
McKenna’s firm continued working with Apple through the early 1980s, overlapping with the Macintosh introduction at the Flint Center in January 1984. By the time TBWA\Chiat\Day took over the advertising relationship, McKenna’s structural work — the press contacts, the imputed legitimacy, the visual seriousness — was already embedded in how the world read Apple.
