Today in Apple history: World gets a chance to test-drive a Mac

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Apple's innovative
Apple's innovative "Test Drive a Macintosh" ad campaign urged potential customers to take a Mac for a spin.
Photo: Apple

November 8: Today in Apple history: Test-drive a Mac November 8, 1984: After initial Mac sales prove disappointing, Apple CEO John Sculley dreams up the “Test Drive a Macintosh” campaign to encourage people to give the revolutionary new computer a chance.

The promotional strategy advises people in possession of a credit card to drop into their local retailer and “borrow” a Macintosh for 24 hours. The idea is that, by the time potential customers need to return the Mac, they will have built up a bond with it — and realized they can’t live without one of Apple’s computers.

While 200,000 would-be customers take advantage of the offer, Apple dealers absolutely hate it.

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Goodbye, 1984: Apple’s ‘Test Drive a Macintosh’ promo

Sculley dreamed up the Test Drive a Macintosh campaign to help skeptical users wrap their heads around Apple’s new machine. Many of them had never seen a graphical user interface, used a mouse or worked with non-IBM computers.

Several memorable TV commercials accompanied the Test Drive a Macintosh campaign. One showed what appeared to be the outline of a high-end sports car obscured by a dust cover.

“It’s powerful,” purred the narrator with fetishistic admiration, as the camera took in all the curves and smooth edges hidden underneath the sheet. “It’s responsive. It handles beautifully. And it’ll blow the doors off anything else in its class.”

At that point, the cover gets whisked away — and the big reveal is that the narrator isn’t talking about a sleek Ferrari or Mercedes. Instead, we saw a mouse connected to a Mac.

The campaign was pure Sculley: more optimistic and less bleak than Apple’s memorable “1984 dystopian future” Mac ad. Instead, it featured a fun, high-concept hook.

Computer as status symbol

At his previous job as president of PepsiCo, Sculley concocted the legendary Pepsi Challenge campaign, which asked customers to take part in a fun experiment — a blind taste test of Pepsi versus Coca-Cola. The Test Drive a Macintosh stunt offered more of the same, giving potential buyers a chance to put the computer through its paces just like when test-driving a car.

“Automobiles were bought for emotional reasons as much as any practical reason,” Sculley told me when I was writing my book The Apple Revolution. Apple wanted to tap into this “emotional reason.” After all, cars were Americana. They were status symbols. They made your life easier and more comfortable.

“The idea of test-driving a car itself is not a controversial idea,” former Apple marketing manager Mike Murray told me. “It’s very acceptable behavior, whether you might buy the car or not. A person can go into a dealership, whether it’s for a Ferrari or a Ford, and say they’d like to test-drive a particular car. The salesperson would say, ‘Sure, let’s go,’ and you’d hop into the car and go for a ride.

“If we hadn’t used that phrase and instead had created a campaign called ‘Take a Mac Home for a Night,’ no one would have done it,” Murray continued. “It wouldn’t have made any sense at all for somebody to go into a computer store and say, ‘I want to take that computer home for a night.’ There would be no emotional memories or persuasion or feelings. We had to draw on past cognitive experiences, and the test drive of a car was the obvious metaphor.”

Test Drive a Macintosh campaign launches with $2.5 million ad blitz

To launch the campaign, Apple shelled out upward of $2.5 million for all 40 pages of advertising in the November 1984 election edition of Newsweek magazine. The final page was a fold-out ad announcing the offer.

“It’s unclear whether Apple has an advertising insert in Newsweek or whether Newsweek has an insert in an Apple brochure,” Sculley quipped in a November 8 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle.

Mixed reviews for Sculley’s Test Drive a Macintosh stunt

In the end, the campaign met with mixed reviews. Around 200,000 customers took advantage of the computer test-drive offer. I’ve spoken with Apple fans who got their first taste of the Mac by taking one home for 24 hours — only to fall in love and never buy a computer made by another company again.

On the other end of the spectrum, computer dealers hated the campaign. Macs were already in short supply. Loaning them out meant lots of paperwork for no guaranteed sale. It also ensured that Macs might not actually be available in stores when real customers came along to buy one.

In addition, many testers returned the Macs in slightly worse condition than when loaned. The damage, while typically not bad enough to charge the shopper, still could be noticeable.

Apple never again ran a test-drive campaign. Still, it’s hard to write off this strategy as a total failure — even if it didn’t spur a Mac sales bump.

Do you remember the Test Drive a Macintosh campaign? When did you first try a Mac? Leave your comments below.

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