Intel Ads Don't Clarify Core Brand (But New Stickers Do)Intel Ads Don't Clarify Core Brand (But New Stickers Do)

The big branding news from Intel is not its upcoming megabucks "Sponsors of Tomorrow" ad campaign -- another sure-to-fail attempt to paint geeks as cool. (I'm referring to the "TV spot portraying the Intel scientist who helped invent the USB drive as a rock star." David Byrne, maybe?) What is welcome news, though, is the quieter "rebadging" effort, which seeks to clarify those hapless stickers identifying the processor inside your PC or laptop.Sure, if Intel wants reinforce its name with consumers, then TV ads will do the trick. The issue, though, is not that average folks haven't heard of the company, but rather that many of them are unclear about what exactly Intel makes. (I'd bet they know it's "chips"; but not "microprocessors.") In the same way that, in the early 1990s, the non-technical masses thought that AOL was the Internet, I suspect that lots of people believe Intel makes computers. Which they do, but not fully locked and loaded, as it were.

Ad-wise, Intel has been putting its name before consumers in a big way since the early Pentiums in the 1990s. That's when the chip behemoth decided to throttle back on its behind-the-scenes brand building -- where it focused on building heft with OEMs and industry insiders -- in favor of a glitzier, conventional-advertising profile.

I've never been sure exactly of the value of the broad recognition that famous four-tone TV signature has brought Intel. (The number of cores has finally caught up to the music.) Heck, consumers don't even really buy laptops by brand; it's a commodity pricing purchase -- but who am I to argue with success.

I've also believed that my thesis about consumers not knowing and not caring (about anything but price and why their *&^*&#@ computer crashes so often) hasn't been helped by the confusing brand names Intel has crammed onto those little stickers slapped (Crazy Glued, actually) onto computers.

Monikers like vPro, ViiV, HT, and even Centrino and Celeron are names only engineers can love. The fact that Intel has oftentimes turned its stickers into multi-brand pileups hasn't helped clarify things.

It all calls to mind that Microsoft parody which was making the rounds several years ago. That YouTube video envisioned what a team of Redmond marketers would've come up with if they'd done the iPod packaging. The purported result: "iPod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition. With Subscription." Indeed.

This is why it's so welcome to me that Intel is taking the smart move of clarifying its sticker branding. Those new stickers hit the streets last month (see Intel unveils new badge design, on Intel's internal blog). However, they're clearly of a piece with (and have probably been planned) since last August, when Intel began centralizing all its desktop processor around the "Core" brand.

Sure, the new stickers, which cut the keyword clutter down by roughly one term, aren't the final word in simplicity. But "Intel Core i7 Inside" cuts to the chase much quicker than the previous verbiage.

Hey, now just about the only problem I can see is that a computer chip really is (or has) a core, so by calling a core a "Core," Intel raises the Scotch Tape-like problem of possibly elevating its brand into a generic. To protect against which, I guess, they'd have to update their stickers to read "Intel Core i7 brand of microprocessor core Inside." Life is indeed a circle.

OK, so here are the after-and-before sticker pictures.

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