THE EVANGELIST
In the mid- to late 1990s, Apple might have gone out of business if it hadn’t been for a crusading army of evangelists led by a charismatic marketing executive. The executive—Guy Kawasaki—was an early proponent of what has come to be known as “evangelist marketing”—turning your customers into messianic proponents. Kawasaki’s primary tool was a popular Internet mailing list called the Mac EvangeList. It not only had a profound influence on Mac culture, it arguably saved Apple.
In the mid-1990s, Apple was the biggest computer maker in the U.S., but increasing competition from Microsoft, as well as a series of botched products and business blunders, led to a long string of heavy losses. Apple appeared to be in a “death spiral,” from which it couldn’t pull out. It’s hard to kill a company as big as Apple, but in 1996 and 1997, it looked doomed.
A big part of the problem was negative press. Bad news about Apple became a self-fulfilling prophecy: stories about Apple’s decline made customers nervous. They bought fewer computers, and the trouble deepened. Realizing this, Kawasaki launched the EvangeList in July 1996 to provide a daily stream of “good news” about Apple. “The whole reason that EvangeList was started was because the press was so negative,” said Kawasaki recently. “I decided that instead of trying to convince the press, we would become the press.”
The EvangeList, sent out daily, was a breezy mix of news, tips, queries, and job postings. Thanks to Kawasaki’s sharp wit, and often hilarious diatribes against Microsoft, the EvangeList quickly became popular. At its peak, the EvangeList boasted 44,000 daily subscribers, although Kawasaki has suggested the list actually reached about 300,000 Macintosh fans, because it was so widely passed around in email, newsgroups, bulletin boards, and Web sites. Kawasaki eventually archived the list on an affiliated “Macway” Web site, which is now gone.
As well as news, the EvangeList had a big activist component. Kawasaki urged subscribers—known as EvangeListas—to proselytize the Mac by engaging Windows PC users in debate. EvangeListas were urged to wear Apple-logoed T-shirts and baseball caps “to show the world we’re not crawling into holes and dying.” He recommended leaving Macintosh magazines in doctors’ waiting rooms and seat pockets on airplanes. And he suggested asking store clerks why they weren’t stocking more Macs, fixing up neglected machines, and talking to potential customers about buying a Mac. Many subscribers spent their weekends as unpaid salespeople at CompUSA, steering customers to the Mac section.
But the list was most famous for marshalling a formidable force of Mac fanatics when it appeared that the platform needed defending in the press. Kawasaki urged subscribers to “educate” wrongheaded journalists who wrote negative stories about Apple; and he often provided the appropriate email address. “Write a letter to the publications that publish stupid, insipid, inaccurate, and unfair stories,” he wrote. “Most journalists are insecure and perceptive: after the 300th flaming message, they’ll get the picture.” Kawasaki’s 300 flames was conservative: some journalists got hundreds—sometimes thousands—of angry, abusive emails. This was in the early days of the Net, before spam, when most reporters got a handful of messages a week and dutifully responded to each one.