INGREDIENT BRANDING: WILL SMARPHONE CHIPSETS BECOME AN INDUSTRY’S GORE-TEX?
Posted by Alexey Arkhipov on October 18, 2012
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Apple has being using the name of Ax chips for quite a while in iPhone advertising, but the rest of the market has kept relatively quiet, preferring to boast about number of cores and gigahertz. But this seems to be changing, as component brands show attempts to play a more prominent role.
One example was a recent advertising campaign by Snapdragon, run across different countries. And then came even more recent one in a form of a cooperative campaign by Motorola and Intel for the new RAZR i smartphone.
These are quite similar examples of ingredient branding, but the history behind these two brands is not the same. While Intel is a chip manufacturer well-known from the early “Intel inside” days and now stretching into mobile, Snapdragon, despite being widely used, seems to be less well known to general smartphone buying public. Nevertheless, it looks that Qualcomm (owner of the Snapdragon brand) has decided to change the situation and is move the brand from tech specification sheets into the consumer mind.
Thus, what we’re getting is another layer to the war of brands in the smartphone category. The top one is a master brand, e.g. Apple vs. Samsung, vs. Nokia. Then comes the layer of sub-brands or product lines: e.g. iPhone vs. Galaxy vs. RAZR. And now, not even mentioning various operating systems, we have an intensifying competition of branded components: A6 vs. Snapdragon vs. Atom… For iPhone, the overall experience and the eco-system make technical components somewhat irrelevant; but for the kingdom of Android, the specs often make the difference and this where the ingredient branding is trying to fight its battle.
It would be very interesting to see how this will unfold and whether any substantial amount of consumers would ever care about the brand of the chip-set in their phone to substantiate Qualcomm’s or Intel’s investments in this type of communication…
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