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Intel's Blue Man Redux February 15, 2001 Jim Welte Faced with declining consumer demand for processing power and slumping PC sales, Intel (INTC, info) launches a massive advertising campaign on February 19 to promote its Pentium 4 microprocessor. The campaign, which uses the tagline "the center of your digital world," hopes to piggy-back on explosive consumer interest in multimedia and devices like MP3 players. The ads will feature the same Blue Man Group performance artist troupe that appeared in the company's Pentium III chip ads. That strategy has drawn the ire of some branding experts, who say that the connection between the blue-faced performers and Intel's Pentium brand of chips was tenuous the first time around, and that users will be misled by the use of the same theme in consecutive campaigns. "When you have the same brand name for two different chips, the consumer sees that as an upgrade, and upgrades are always optional. There's a huge difference between a compelled purchase and an optional purchase," says Elizabeth Goodgold, chief of The Nuancing Group in San Diego. "The consumer sees optional, and because times are hard with layoffs going on, no VC money, [the] dot-com economy falling off, am I going to buy this chip? No." Goodgold says that by using the same brand name and the same ad theme, Intel has "truly created a sea of similarity. If I'm not tech savvy, I won't really see the value here, and that's what this campaign doesn't address." This is not the first time the company has used the same advertising theme for two different products, says Intel official Joann O'Brien, who says the firm used the "Bunny People" in silver lab suits for both its Pentium and Pentium II processors. "We have been successful in the past in using similar icons across different processor generations," says O'Brien, who cites the success of the Pentium III campaign and a desire for continuity between the two chips as the reason for using the Blue Man Group again. John Rubino, managing director for the Seattle office of branding consultant Landor Associates, thinks that the purpose of using a quirky campaign like the Blue Man Group or the Bunny People isn't necessarily to elicit a purchase, but more to raise brand recognition. "It seems like they found the same thread that they had in their last campaign in the Blue Man Group and tried to extend that into their most recent campaign," he says. Skeptics say that, ads or no ads, consumers just don't need the muscle of a Pentium 4 chip because software and bandwidth simply can't keep up. "Asking consumers to buy the Pentium 4 is like driving a Ferrari when the speed limit on every road is 40 miles per hour," says Giga Information Group research fellow Rob Enderle. "It just isn't providing the performance value that it once did, because the PC is just part of something now, it's not the whole thing." |
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