AMD Ships Out New Sales Strategy On U.S.S. Hornet

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Advanced Micro Devices intends to start selling PC splash over processor specs and the chip maker on Thursday picked a venue associated closely with splash landings -- the U.S.S. Hornet aircraft carrier -- to kick-start its new AMD Vision marketing campaign for retail.

"Consumer focus groups tell us they don't want to talk about the technology. They say that the speed of the processor no longer defines their PC experience," said Nigel Dessau, chief marketing officer at Sunnyvale, Calif.-based AMD.

"No more techno-babble," he added, opening a day-long event on the Hornet, the vessel that fished the Apollo 11 command module out of the ocean after its successful splashdown following the first manned trip to the moon. The carrier is now a museum in Alameda, Calif.

Taking a page out of Apple's book, AMD will attempt to woo consumers in retail stores like Best Buy with point-of-sale material and sales training that emphasizes the overall PC experience instead of the speeds-and-feeds message that Dessau said has dominated retail engagements for two decades.

"The only thing we have working against us is 20 years of processor marketing. Or really, one year of processor marketing that we've all repeated 19 times," he joked.

In a mock retail environment set up on the Hornet, new AMD Vision-stickered notebooks -- many of them unreleased -- from PC makers Hewlett-Packard, Asus and MSI were on display. While AMD has traditionally armed retail partners with booklet-sized point-of-sale literature and dozens of different logos for different configurations, Vision deploys just three stickers, a thin supporting pamphlet and scant reference to clock speeds or cache size.

The shift away from deep-diving technical marketing is the result of feedback from focus groups and shop-along experiments that AMD has conducted over the past year, said Leslie Sobon, AMD's vice president of worldwide product marketing.

AMD Vision breaks PCs built on AMD processor and graphics technology into three categories that emphasize what a given system can do for the end user, she said. Standard Vision stickers will go on low-priced systems suitable for playing games and consuming media; Vision Premium designates more powerful PCs for users who want to do a bit more; and Vision Ultimate is for high-end workstations that are used to create visual content.

The emphasis on gaming and entertainment consumption reflects AMD's market research, Sobon said.

"We know that computers are seen as entertainment devices by consumers. And that means there's a great connection to our technology, with our CPU and GPU integration," she said. "But how can we communicate that in the retail setting? The current strategy we have clearly isn't working for us that well -- look at our market share."

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