The rebranding comes at a time when the chipmaker is trying to evolve into a more consumer-focused marketing technology company, said Doug Cooper, general manager of Intel Canada.
“The market is no longer driven just by semiconductor technology. It’s important, and a thing we do well, but the experience the consumer is looking for is driven by many factors beyond just the silicon that we produce,” said Cooper.
Part of the goal of the Leap Ahead brand, he added, is to communicate that Intel wants to create new, exciting leaps in technology that deliver new ways for consumers to enrich their lives.
According to channel marketing expert Dave Walsh, Intel has done well in changing its brand to no longer centre around the company name.
“It’s a direction that’s going to support the diversification of their product line,” said
Walsh. Instead, the attention is on “Centrino for portability, Centrino Duo for performance and Viiv for digital home entertainment.”
For the channel, he added, the impact will be invisible. “It can have a tremendous amount of potential depending on where they take those three individual pieces out to the channel,” he said.
An integral part of Intel’s strategy is to enable partners to participate in new markets and platform solutions, said Cooper.
“We’ll be providing everything from training to collateral materials, and for the white box market we’ll supply the basic building blocks so they can create solutions on their own.”
As long as resellers continue to co-market with Intel, said Walsh, they’re not going to decrease their value and perception to their customer.
“But depending on what they (Intel) do and where they go with co-marketing support, the brand on its own will mean nothing to me, you or one of the ten thousand resellers in Canada,” he said.
The success of Intel’s new identity will largely depend on how well the company can drive the brand belief, Walsh said. “There’s already a momentum going on,” he added. “But with a $2.5 billion global awareness budget you can really drive that brand.”
Intel sees it as a new era, said Cooper, extending on the success of the past 37 years when Silicon Valley pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore created the original Intel “dropped-e” logo.
“Now Intel is rising to the occasion and saying we’ve been responsible for evolving all of the uses, and now we’re just going to be more overt about telling people what it is we’ve been doing.”
