I don't see many startups who display evidence of holding the belief that "marketing is about values". There's a lot of focus on making something useful, but not telling a story that will resonate with a human being's heart. I wonder why this is...
I suspect it's because the enviroment and consumers are different. People are no longer okay with you saying you think different. They need you to prove it. They need you to show it.
With Apple, a lot of their advertising focuses on what's different about them but they tell that narrative in a way that conveys that they came to this conclusion (aka the product being sold) by thinking about the problem in a way that hadn't been thought about before. They are still narrative but they have to make it believable in a different way.
A lot of others are doing the same but usually not doing as good a job on the latter, but they still focus on proving what it is they value, by the decisions they make in building the product.
Most startups struggle to get awareness. A very abstract tag line (e.g. "Do it the fun way") doesn't really help with that problem. Your customers are different too -- a "mainstream" audience is more moved by what feels good than early adopters (who, generally speaking, are trying to satisfy a "pain point").
Apple in 1997 was very well known. They were competing with PCs in a technical way (e.g. faster computers), and it wasn't working very well. Their shift in marketing was to build a stronger Apple brand and make more of an emotional pitch. It turned out to be a more powerful differentiator and was longer-lasting than focusing on the benefits of a particular product.
