Intel's Brand Is At Risk ANd The Company Doesn't Seem To Realize It

Intel's former marketing genius is legendary. The Intel Inside campaign forced PC makers to brand the Intel logo so heavily that it became more important than that of the manufacturer of the final product. But that was a decade ago, and despite the cataclysmic changes in the industry's landscape, Intel continues to go to market in the same fashion.

Under this model, Intel takes a small percentage of the profit it makes and funnels it back to PC makers in the form of marketing dollars. Given that Intel and Microsoft are the true (and sometimes only) moneymakers every time a computer is sold, there are plenty of dollars for the chip maker to spread around. These marketing funds, of course, come with all sorts of restrictions concerning requirements to brand Intel.

The trouble is that Intel has been so successful with this branding that it believes the model will work forever, and no one inside the organization is willing to say it needs to be changed.

But its past success is just that,in the past. The biggest reason this sort of branding no longer works is because it really no longer matters much whether you have a Pentium, a Xeon or, for that matter, the new Centrino platform powering your system. Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal writes an annual column on what to look for in a PC, and the chip hasn't been the top priority for several years.

Intel wants everyone to believe that the choice of chip matters, but it really comes in fourth place in terms of what is most important in the PC, in my opinion. Bandwidth, memory and the operating system are all much more important to the user experience.

Now Intel is making things even more confusing by introducing too many cute names for its chips without doing enough to explain to solution providers how to best position each of them. Intel needs to realize that the complete solution,not the PC itself,is the brand of the future.

First we have the Pentium processor, which Intel keeps adding numbers to like it was keeping track of the number of hamburgers it has sold. Then we have the 32-bit Xeon chip, designed for servers, about which the company made such a big deal earlier this month,Intel said it is on track to ship twice the number of Xeon chips through the channel this year than last year. To muddy the water a bit more, we have the Itanium series, the 64-bit server chip that is seeing a slow adoption rate. And we can't forget the Celeron line,remember the low-end chip Intel introduced when AMD undercut it from a pricing standpoint and began gaining share? It's amazing how a little bit of competition can improve price points.

The newest arrival is the amazing and dazzling, ultra-cool and speedy, yet low-power-consuming, super-duper Centrino platform. It's the first time Intel has built a chip for the mobile PC rather than paring down a CPU designed for the desktop.

Trouble is, the company is doing little to explain to solution providers the differences between all these architectures.

It's a classic case of a leadership company holding onto the old way of doing things because it worked so well in previous years. Past success does not guarantee future success, and with solution providers gaining more brand recognition daily, Intel must think differently about where the Intel Inside campaign fits. Intel Inside, the solution, is different from Intel Inside, the PC product. The important brand is the solution, not the product.

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