How Brand and Marketing Vision Led to Long-Term Market Domination

The Intel Inside® Success Story

I started my career in advertising and learned technology branding from the best. I was part of the Intel Inside® team that built the ingredient brand into a global powerhouse. Today, two decades later, Intel continues to dominate. As of Q3 2011, Intel had 83.7% of global microprocessor revenue according to IHS iSuppli. Amazing.  

Back then, visionaries at Intel and Dahlin Smith White Advertising believed that if they could create a brilliant push/pull campaign for “the computer inside”, that brand preference, loyalty, and long-term equity would result. At the heart of the pull campaign was a brand strategy so simple and so brilliant that it worked, and worked, and is still working today.

Safety and technology were Intel Inside’s two key customer promises and, along with “the computer inside” positioning, Intel was able to convince millions to “spot” and buy “the very best PCs” based on the microprocessor. Each campaign’s message honed in on safety or technology, confidently answering buyers’ concerns, “Is the computer I’m buying the safest bet?” and, “Am I getting the latest technology?” Not to go unmentioned is the breakthrough creative based on benefits and even emotional concerns, not speed and feeds. Creative spoke to buyers’ software compatibility concerns and “FUD” (fear, uncertainty and doubt) while appealing to others’ “technolust”. Soon, Intel Inside was the de facto standard for IT volume buyers and home PC customers, and a must for OEMs.

It all sounds so simple today; three paragraphs on how it was done. But let’s expound upon the facts. Intel dominates the market for a myriad of reasons, like having perhaps the best technology R&D and manufacturing in the world. Staying one step ahead of the competition is not easy, nor cheap. The vision had to be espoused by many to make it work. But I tell you what, without the Intel Inside® brand, would anyone have considered the brand of microprocessor in his or her PC? Perhaps some, but certainly not 83.7%.

Read more about the Intel Inside program here.