Engineering Intel’s brand from the “Core” up

Gabriel: Welcome to another episode of Brand Enabled with me, Gabriel Cohen, and Holly Osborne. It’s just me doing the intro today, but you’ll see Holly in the interview.

Now we all know that today you can’t go more than five minutes without hearing about the biggest brands in AI. Everything is Nvidia, Nvidia, Nvidia. The funny thing is, when I worked in IT about 20 years ago, Nvidia was just a company that sold graphics cards. They were for hardcore gamers.

When I first got into branding, the company everyone wanted to work with was Intel. And it’s astonishing to think about how far that brand has fallen. I mean, back in 2000, Intel was the sixth-largest company in the world by market cap. Since then they’ve shed about 80% of their value. And, in an era where AI explosion is lifting all chip makers, Intel isn’t even among the top 10 chip makers anymore.

So from sixth largest company in the world to today, not even being among the top 10 chip makers. A lot of this, I think, you can trace back to 2018, CEO resignation. You can read all about that in the news. But after that, some questionable decisions were made with the new leadership. This crucial choice to double down on manufacturing just as the world was shifting to design and asset-light models, preparing for an era of generative AI where parallel processing was more important than linear processing, which is what Intel were great at. They decided to try and compete against TSMC and actually doing the hardcore manufacturing part of it instead of the chip design.

Anyway, long story short, what was once a towering brand became a shell of its former self. And now, in recent months, even after our interview, there have been talks about them even splitting the company up. But the key thing in this episode is we get to hear from someone who lived that story.

We’re to be talking to Merlin Kister, who spent nearly two decades inside Intel, if you pardon the pun. From 2006 all the way through to 2024 he served as global brand director. He went through a brand refresh, led marketing across North and South America, ran US marketing for a time and also spent a few years in a sustainability role for good measure as well.

In this conversation, Holly and I go under the hood on one of the most iconic brands. We talk about all the key aspects of the Intel brand that we’ve all learned in our textbooks, but we’re going to go under the hood and hear stories that, hopefully, most of us have never heard before. We’re going to talk about ingredient branding. We’re going to talk about the famous Intel sonic logo. We’re going to talk about its famous brand and product architecture. If anyone remembers Celeron and Pentium, and then how, they actually took a really wrong move after that.

This is such a great conversation that we just started talking with Merlin and then just decided to hit record. So, uh, Holly just jumped straight into a question and we hit record. So embrace the messiness of this episode and enjoy the conversation. Holly over to you.

Holly: As this uncertainty sort of prevails right now in terms of budget and kind of how bullish companies are going to be, they have to keep brand going. But it’s not necessarily a time to invest in additive – adding more and more and more to your brand – but rather to make what you have really mean something and to do more with less. And that was the drum that was always banging.

Merlin: Less is definitely more. But I think what we’ll find, Holly too and Gabe, is that you’re going to have the opportunity to have much more personalized, more contextual based marketing and messages. And how do you get that right? If again, when we talk about AI, right, it’s a tool. Everybody’s learning how do we use this tool?

Fortunately or unfortunately, the tool is changing so rapidly in its capability and intelligence… But now with AI, as long as you have those messages… and I think what’s interesting with what KFC and Taco Bell did was they had messages that were not created by AI. They actually created the messages. So, someone wrote out the messages, but AI picked the right message for the context, which I think is really good.

We all have seen AI create things that are not following guidelines, right? Are off, right? And they call them hallucinations, you know, what have you. But having that more… well, at least for this example, more manual where someone was literally creating the messages, I think that that’s great. I think AI probably will help. And I know we use that too at Intel to help craft messages. And then someone had to go through and manually, “Okay, let’s read these. Let’s make sure that they’re the correct ones. There’s nothing… no hallucinations, right? That come from the AI.”

Gabriel: From a brand management standpoint at the corporate brand level, you think about how much you had to deal with this at Intel, but the number of… if you can get people sharing stuff with corporate, that’s great, but the other side of that is you get inundated and you can’t get through all of the content. So if we can figure out a way to have AI be that first line of defense and review.

Holly: I think you bring up a really important point that is missed by, I think, some companies who are looking to take advantage of AI but aren’t really sure what that roadmap or that path looks like. The part where humans do intervene and they correct the AI doesn’t have to be an arduous, months on months on months process if you have a pretty finite universe that you’re trying to manage.

And there are a few companies out there, like Emergence AI, who are helping companies at… they’re sort of that intermediary layer between the AI technology and the company who wants to maximize and leverage AI to maximize their business but doesn’t really know what that path is. And, in that process, if we assign a few humans to watch the responses, and we give ourselves permission to make a couple of mistakes, we know that we’re going to learn a couple things from it, and we correct the AI, it just gets stronger and stronger, and it really can be reflective of our own voice.

I think the personalization opportunities are amazing. I’m glad you brought that up, Merlin. Was that even a figment of… I’m thinking back to the peak of Intel… was that even a figment of our imagination at that point? We wanted personalization. We wanted rapid response and contextual messaging, but…

Merlin: Yeah, so let me start back with… so when I joined, I joined on and marketing… just like I’m sure for many of the people that are listening here and viewing this… marketing means many different things to many different companies. When I joined Intel, I was, if you could call it business unit, I was in the business unit. Doing, you could argue, product marketing. So working with the engineers and coming up with here’s the value prop, for the products.

I think that that experience and having that is so critical because you need to understand the technology. And more importantly, you need to understand, if you’re in the tech world, how to communicate with these folks and how they communicate with you. Because again, you’re going to be that translator to consumers who have maybe, well in 99% of the cases, a completely different mindset and not have that same kind of thinking. So I think that that was really important. And it also helped me in my career get the… earn, I should say, the trust of the business unit folks.

At Intel, the business units folk held the P&L, which I know is very different because many times the marketing person is also the P&L owner. But at Intel, the business unit was the P&L owner. But for them to know that I understood the business, and I understood how they made money, and they… they trusted me with that. And I think that that’s important. And I say that too, as I’ve moved into different roles and different leadership positions, I’ve always come back to whenever I had a junior marketer or someone coming in from the outside, I’d always start the conversation with, “Do you know how we make money?” And you’d be surprised, even with people that have been with Intel or a company for a long time, they don’t know how to answer that question.

It’s easy to say, “Well, we sell stuff and people give us money for that.” That’s not what I’m talking about. You need to know exactly where are the profit centers, what’s really important for us. Intel is a manufacturing company. If we don’t sell out our factories, then our cost structure falls apart, right? And our profitability falls apart.

So it’s really important for marketers to understand how the company makes money. And it’s not, sell more things. People buy our things, they give us money. It’s not that. It’s, where are the profit centers? What really matters for us, not only maybe today, but also in the future? So you have to understand that. Where are the profit dollars going to be coming from?

Intel is a manufacturing company, right? So if we didn’t sell out our fabs, our factories, our profitability took a hit. So it was really important not only to sell volume, but it was also critically important for us to sell high-end processors because of the business we were in, which is – if we’re going to build a new fab that’s going to be on the latest technology, we’re talking billions of dollars of investment. So you really did need that big profit pool to come in in order for us to fund the next generation of products.

So that was kind of the first phase. Then I got into some marketing and then really product brand and global brand role. And I think there, just being able to understand the business unit and how brand can help with the business unit priorities was just a phenomenal experience for me, but it’s also really good to have.

Often I hear this from other folks and other companies that sometimes they don’t trust the marketing people, right? So either sales doesn’t necessarily trust the marketing people or the business unit doesn’t trust the marketing people that they have their best interests, right? Or even brand, because sometimes I think, Gabe you said it, you’re kind of in this ivory tower of brand, right? And you come in with squishy sometimes brand things. It’s really helpful to have that trust and that earned respect to say, “Hey, I understand the business. We’re not just going to be doing brand things for brand things.”

During that time, Intel’s business had changed dramatically in terms of what we needed to do. And really cleaning up a lot of the things on the brand side so that brand could legitimately lay claim to, “We are helping our company with profitability and sales.”

Merlin: The business was suffering and we had some very, very smart people, as you can imagine, in our business management group who said, “Hey, wait a minute, we track this out over time and people get more confused. They’re not going to buy our high-end products. They’re just going to pick whatever. And that’s going to impact our business because we’re not going to be able to afford to invest in the next generation of technology.” So again, here is a really great example of marketing and branding has to be tied hand in hand to the business. And understanding how the company makes money.

I’m going to now go to the consumer side. Now at this point with the consumer, there really isn’t that fog of technology happening, right? Because now PCs have been around for a while. They know that they work. Intel’s still seen as quality, reliability, and performance. That’s great, we want to keep that going. But we want to make sure that they have a very simple choice. They don’t have to worry about gigahertz, and cache, and all of these other weird technology things. How can we hide them from a consumer and just make it very simple for a good, better, best.

So we came up with… right now everybody will say, well, of course this makes sense… but we came up with Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7. And we wanted everybody, quite frankly… well, we’d love people to buy a Core i7, but we wanted everybody to buy a Core i5. Because Core i5 gave us a big jump over a Core i3 in terms of profit dollars. And we knew just from the psychology of a good, better, best model that most people will be in that middle point. So the pricing for that middle point was critical for us to understand that we were going to generate this much of profit dollars to be able to invest back in the business. So there was not just a good, better, best model. There was the business behind it, the pricing model, the whole thing came together.

It sounds really easy. It was really difficult to implement. And you can imagine, because the business unit was saying, “Well, wait a minute. If I come out with a new technology, you’re not going to brand it? You’re not going to name it something?” No, it’s just going to be Core i3, i5, and i7. And we’re going to just have customers understand that.

Gabriel: And what was before i3, i5, i7? The way you’re explaining it is, i7 was done almost as a way to be able to sell more of i5, right? Because people are going to buy less of the top range one, but more of the middle one. I remember when I was at Dell, it was the same thing. We had the laptop, we had the Latitude D300, the D500, and the D700. We hardly sold any D700s, but what it is, it sold a ton of the D500s, which is where most of the, which is where most of the most of the margin was.

Merlin: When we were doing it, we called it the Wendy’s model. Because I remember us selling it into the execs and they would always go, “Okay, well, why three? Why not four? Why don’t you have four? Why not five? Because there’s a middle point when you have five, why three? The Wendy’s example that we had passed along was, hey Wendy’s was selling singles and doubles, from a sandwich perspective, but, just as you said Gabe, not many people were buying a double. They were all buying a single. So they introduced a triple and all of sudden double sales take off. Which helps them from a profitability and revenue perspective. So it was that same model…

Gabriel: It’s a role of psychology there because if there’s a single and a double and you go to buy a double you’re like, “Oh, I probably look like a pig if I’m eating a double.” But when there’s a triple available it’s like, “Oh, I’m not so much of a greedy pig that I’m gonna eat the triple I’m only gonna have the double.”

Merlin: Yes, 100%. And by the way, simple is hard, right? I think Steve Jobs says that, right? Simple is hard.

We started the conversation of how do you scale your message? Well, if your message changes all the time, it’s impossible to scale. And if you’re going to try to get your message out through all your different channels or mediums… in this case, have some of your customers repeat your message… you can’t change it all the time. It just doesn’t work.

So this was a very simple brand construct. To this day, I always look to see if companies follow a simple brand construct or what they’re doing to make things happen where they have multiple products. And again, Holly, your example, the toothpaste aisle, a little bit different than the example in tech world. But how do you navigate that? And how does a consumer understand which one I should choose.

Holly: I think it starts to get back to what you mentioned recently, Merlin, about the balance between brand and marketing investment, or brand versus advertising. When you say it’s remarkable that the company held onto its brand position for 10 years, I’m coming from the perspective of having been on the agency side, like at a Landor, going, “Yes, exactly. That’s exactly what it should have done and should do.” We would build a brand positioning that was intended to last seven to 10 years. So that was what we were selling and how you could justify being at Landor, at Prophet, or at Interbrand. Gabe, you can keep me honest here, we were charging, in many cases, seven figures to establish that core organizing idea. That should, if it’s doing its job right… should not change for the company for seven to 10 years, and that is the touchstone that the customer can always go back to.

So as you introduce different product lines, and you bump things out, and the range grows or contracts, and the technology or the features and benefits change, people can always go back to that constancy. Even with McDonald’s – “Oh, you’re doing salads now. Who are you? Is this a spa?” No, it’s been, “I’m loving it.”, it’s been based on love for a couple of decades now. IBM, very consistent in the way they talk to business people. They don’t come off of “smarter planet”.

So I have to say, I think what you’re describing is brilliant in that balance of – you do not stray from that overarching idea that you created. That allows you… you tell me if that’s true or not… that allows you to take some liberties and do some experimenting on the product level to understand what sells.

Merlin: Yeah, and it’s interesting. I do want to be clear, there was a lot of pressure throughout that time to add more… to do offshoots.

Holly: Oh, I’m sure.

Merlin: Could we do a Core plus? A Core i3 plus? And what happened was… and I have to say, some cases the brand team was not successful in stopping what you would probably say is insanity, or I’ll put it nicely – experimentation. Like, let’s try this. In some cases they were. But what I found that came back from the real world was, those things didn’t last. The market chose and rejected it.

We had started a product line, an offshoot, for thin and light devices. We said, “Hey, it’s really not Core i3, i5, i7 because that stands really a high performance products, we want to have an offshoot, we want to do a Core M3 and M5.” And it stood for… well, the M didn’t really stand for anything. People said it stands for mobile, it didn’t. We just said we’ll try a different letter and we’ll put that in the market as well, because these were products that had high battery life as well as performance. So the value prop was a little bit different. But what came back from our retailers… and by the way, the initial thing, the retailers were very, very enthusiastic, like, “Yes, we’d love to have new, fresh… put it out there.” Our PC manufacturers were like, “Hmm, I don’t know.” You know, they’re kind of say, “Okay, well, we’ll try it.” And what came back from the consumers… people were like, “I don’t understand this. So should I buy an M3 or an i3? Like, which is better? Is an M5 better than an i3?”. And by the way, if you think about that, a consumer asking… we had to create content and collateral to try to explain this. Which gets you out of this simple and gets you into… and again, I go back, Holly you started this off, you and Gabe… with the consumer. At this point, the consumer doesn’t have a lot of mind share and doesn’t want to spend that much time thinking about this.

Holly: Right.

Merlin: And go, “Wait a minute, if you’re going to ask me to do a lot of research… I’m already doing research on a PC, but then trying to figure out the little intricacies of what you’re trying to get across…” – it was a bridge too far.

Holly: Well, it wasn’t that antithetical to your entire strategy around, let’s simplify this, let’s take the fog away. And then they just slowly started rolling the fog back into the sea.

Merlin: 100%. And I was in the conversations and I remember discussing vehemently, “Please do not do this. This will not work.” But again, too, you have to say, “Okay, let’s try risk. Maybe it will work. And maybe consumers will understand.” At that point, the business unit, who is the ultimate arbiter of this because they own the P&L, a decision made at that level was to the head of sales, as you can imagine, right? The head of the business unit, right? Everybody’s involved in these conversations. And they said, “Okay, we’re gonna go, and we’re gonna try it.”

And I will say to Intel’s credit, we also came back weeks later and said, “Okay, how was this doing, right? Is this really working?” And then we got the feedback, and it wasn’t working. So those products were very short-lived in the market. The same thing with like Plus. We had Plus, right? Because we… again, it gets back to this feature creep. “Oh, we’ve got this great feature. How are people going to know? We’ll add a little plus.” But people don’t know what that means and, at this point, consumers don’t really care.

Gabriel: I’m imagining then also all the different constant updates to the brand guidelines, the brand strategy, brand portfolio, and brand architecture documentation, where you’re adding and taking things away and trying to reorganize and explain the portfolio. I think one of the takeaways and learnings from a brand enablement standpoint is a reminder of… and I know I have a colleague who will fully agree with this… how brand architecture and brand portfolio management is oftentimes the most important element or aspect of the corporate brand role.

To your point, you don’t always have influence on it. But I think it also goes back to one of the points you said earlier, Merlin, the importance of being able to understand and talk about it through the lens of revenue and profitability, not just of consumer insights. And ensure that we as brand professionals, especially if your agency or client side, not just thinking about brand architecture as an organization principle for our logos or for just thinking about naming structure, but actually being able to connect.

So I know you said that there were people opening doors for you, but how did you start to develop some of these relationships? Were you just calling someone or emailing? How did you… any like practical… take us like back in time, like, “Okay, there’s these three people.” How do you actually do it to get that ball rolling?

Merlin: So, this is going to sound very basic. But it was, “Can I see the org chart of your organization? Can someone sit and go through this organization so I understand what people do?” And then figure out, okay, out of those folks, who do I need to set up a one-on-one with? And just get…or a coffee, because people are very busy. So sometimes they’re like, “Wait a minute. I don’t know why I need to even talk to you, Mr. Marketing Branding Person. Why should I spend any time?”

So it was getting that initial, “Hey, here’s who I am. Let me tell you what I do and how I think I can help you.” But also just the curiosity of, “What do you do?” Because then I can adjust what we do. But it was as simple as, “Can I please have the org chart?” And again, this is for a company the size of Intel where, you know, at that point we had 110,000 employees or 100,000 employees. You don’t know all the different people making all the decisions.

Holly: I love that Merlin.

Gabriel: How would you explain then what you did and what your role was in a way that… like what worked and maybe what didn’t?

Merlin: I think it just comes down to… So what worked? What worked was showing a genuine interest in what they do and understanding their KPIs, or how they are viewed as a success. So that’s one.

And then two: being able to… and it doesn’t have to all be in the same meeting, doesn’t have to happen within 20 minutes over a coffee… but being able to have that second conversation of, “Hey, here’s what I do and here’s how I think I can help. What do you think about that?” And drawing them into that conversation. So I think that that is what works as a perspective. And then I would also say… that’s on the business side… from a product side, you have to… and again, I’m talking about from a technology product… you have to understand how the technology works, at least at a basic level.

So there’s just one thing where if you’re a marketer… and, you know, we had a lot of technology, a lot of features, and some of the folks just didn’t want to learn the ins and outs of how this works and how this does it… By the way, how do you create a message that works if you don’t really understand what it does?

Gabriel: Holly, you said something earlier on when you were talking about getting to the kind of simple, overall story. So I’ve been itching to ask Merlin about this, to follow up on it. I’d love to talk about the overall brand story that you tell, that simple articulation of what it is that we stand for, at an organization like Intel.

It’s such a challenge in technology, especially when you get into something like this. But I still remember the Sponsors of Tomorrow as a core brand idea.

Merlin: Yeah.

Gabriel: In fact, a colleague here who actually worked on that back then…

Merlin: Yeah, that was a way of positioning Intel as your technology for the future. That was putting a human face… so if you looked at the actual implementation of that, it was trying to put a human…

Gabriel: Talk about maybe what that is, because it’s like you and I just talking in codes at the moment because we know what it is but…

Merlin: Yeah. So Sponsors of Tomorrow was created because we wanted to show… and it was a tagline that we used… to show that Intel was your technology leader and that we were driving the future for the world. And by the way, Intel products go into virtually every technology product that exists around the world. So the things that we make really do enable all the great things that people see and use every day. You may not be aware of it, but there’s some backend piece that has Intel technology that’s critical to making that wonderful experience happen.

At that time it was, how do we make sure that people understand that we are this leader and we continue to reinforce that message? Now, underneath that, the tenants of the brand don’t change — performance, reliability, quality. Those are the foundational elements of the Intel brand, and you don’t ever want to lose those. And if you look at technology, no matter what product you have, you want it to be high performance, you want it to be high quality, and you want it to be reliable. You want to be able to trust it. So those elements are really the foundation underpinnings. But now we’re doing this, “Hey, we’re the leaders of technology.”

What they did from the execution perspective was show how Intel has humans that come up with this great technology that makes us a leader. And it was also giving us that human approach, because sometimes you can say you’re a technology leader and you can come across as cold. This was done to say, “Hey, here are some of the people.” And they highlighted some of the folks that came up with like USB technology and things like that, that people would never know. Some wicked smart engineer came up with that technology, that was done at Intel, right? So the thing that changes the way you connect with devices, that came from Intel, but it came specifically from this person. So Intel is just not this cold technology company, it’s a leader, and we’re based with humans.

And I think that that kind of gave us that more approachable perspective.

Gabriel: You humanized the brand by doing that. Was that a program or do you look at it as a… how long did that brand idea last? Did it ladder up to something even bigger above that or was it its own… did it sit at the top of the brand house?

Merlin: Well, it certainly sat at the top of the brand house.

Whenever we created new brand… if you want to call it taglines or corporate views… you have to have it last for a while. And if it doesn’t, then you really, you’ve shot in the wrong direction. So that one was a couple of years. And I know from an Intel perspective, we always like to have stuff that would stay for about four to five years before you switch. You need to repeat those messages that often in order for people to even understand, and internalize, and then be able to spell it back out. “Oh, I know Intel, they stand for blank.”

Sponsors of Tomorrow was the tag. The underlying part of that program and how it was executed was first – technology leader. We are the leaders in technology. At that point, we had started to get some competitors that we’re having some competitive technology products that were pretty good. So how do we reinforce Intel as that leader that you want?

And then putting the human side on it… because again, trying to make this not to be this cold, corporate behemoth and make it more approachable… was the second. So those elements stayed.

Sponsors of Tomorrow, I think, was around for several years, but it didn’t change the brand house, if that makes sense. So how we articulated it may have shifted, but those key elements of what we needed to do stood. And again, it went back to how do we differentiate ourselves now with competitors that are coming up in the marketplace with some pretty decent products? How do we make sure that we reinforce Intel as your technology leader?

Gabriel: So one of the things that we have to talk about, because it’s such a core aspect of the brand, and I think you were one of the early adopters [plays the Intel sonic brand].

Holly: The famous sound mark.

Merlin: This sound mark. You know, there was a study that was done, and this is now several years ago, that that was the most recognized sound in the world, besides a baby crying. Which I thought, “Well, one, I don’t know that research set, right? I don’t know how we were put in with baby crying.” But that sound… and I think Intel… and I don’t know because I’ve never researched this… was really one of the early adopters of a sound mark.

Gabriel: That, yeah.

Merlin: And a consistent use of a sound mark. And what I find fascinating now is, we’ve had that sound mark, gosh I don’t know, decades.

Holly: I was going say like 20 plus, yeah?

Merlin: Yeah, over, over. So we’ve had that for decades and I’m now seeing companies like understand, “Wow, I should have that.” Netflix: ta-dum, right? In fact, if you see… what I love with Netflix, I don’t know, for all of your Netflix folks out there, they send you emails and the subject line is ta-dum. So you know this is from Netflix, right? Which is incredible. With a written way of trying to get you to be associated with that sound and understand that that sound, when you hear it, is meaningful.

Visa, I think, is doing it as well with your touch, right? When you touch something, they’re trying to get that… when you pay for something to get that actual sound. So you know, “Okay, this went through the Visa network. I’ve got this, you know… I know it’s going to be safe or secure or whatever.” Whatever they’re trying to get across.

I think that it’s something that’s underutilized, but I also say, if it’s over-utilized, I also fear – How do you break through with the noise? Right, if every company in the world said, need a sound mark and start coming out with them, how do you…

Gabriel: Well, I think that’s what some brands have done. They’ve fallen into the trap of that.

The point is Intel was one of the first, especially in the type of category that you were in, to think about the role of sonic. How sonic has evolved… it’s beyond just a sonic tagline, which is what that was… because now in a crowded market, you know, just adding a sonic logo isn’t going to help.

What the Visa example shows is that the difference between just a sonic mark and a sonic DNA is, having a sonic DNA means understanding the role that sound plays within your experience, not just in your marketing channel. Sure, that’s one element and it’s going to be helpful if you can have it in your own branded content, in your advertising. But thinking about how it plays a role within the experience. Whether that’s hold music, whether, if you’re a digital brand in some way, in the web experience… the Netflix makes sense because that’s what happens when you turn it on every time. You don’t even need to be in the room – if you hear that ta-dum in the room next door, you know that someone has just turned Netflix on.

Holly: And if now we’re saying that we can create a cinematic experience within the home that is worth you paying money for every month, versus going out to the movies and going out to consume, we want to give you that movie theater like experience.

Versus, take like a Motorola [makes the Motorola sound] – Please stop! Please make it stop. No one wants their phone ringing any more than it already is. And so that was to me a sort of a cheaper… forgive me, Motorola… but more of just we’re grabbing at something, this is the sound our phone makes, let’s make this famous. And within about a year or two, people were like, “Please make that stop.” if I hear that sound.

Merlin: Well, it’s interesting to go back to our earlier conversation around Intel Inside and how that started. This was one of the things where we provided an incentive to the PC manufacturers that if you had a message… let’s talk now about TV commercials or video… If you had a message that had Intel in it and then you put our logo at the end with that sound mark, you could get reimbursed. You would get a partial reimbursement for that ad to be run. So what would happen, and if you think about it, at like Christmastime all the PC manufacturers (and this is before) used to run ads all the time, right? So you would hear this [makes the Intel sound] and you’d see Intel come up at the end. And our research even came back and people thought, “Wasn’t that an Intel ad?” No, it’s a Dell ad. It was an HP ad. It was…

Holly: Best Buy.

Merlin: Right. We did it for retailers as well. I go back to this strategy, looking at every touch point, looking at how we can utilize our brand and marketing bag of tricks.

Gabriel: I’d love to put a thesis to you and get your reaction to this because it speaks to the sonic mark, it speaks to the Intel Inside sticker on the PCs, and it really relates to this conversation we were having earlier around this notion of brand, understanding the importance of brand and what it can do, versus demand.

My thesis is that at Intel you spotted almost like an arbitrage opportunity of how you could leverage the importance of brand and prey on the fact that a lot of these PC manufacturers didn’t understand brands so much and that they wanted to prioritize revenue. Because what they did is they essentially gave up brand equity in order to get short-term cash in from Intel, but by doing so they ended up almost commoditizing their own brands in some way. The role of brand that they played in the consumer decision reduced because now all of a sudden, if I’m Dell and HP, what I care about more as a consumer is does it have the Intel sticker. I’ve decommoditized myself, great I’ve taken short-term revenue… But Intel is playing chess here when everyone else is playing checkers.

Holly: Great question.

Merlin: So Gabe, everybody knew. The PC manufacturers and the retailers have very smart marketing and branding people. So people understood… maybe not in the very, very beginning because it got so big… but they understood what was happening here. And by the way, there was a lot of pushback, there were a lot of conversations.

I’ll give you one example where the consumer actually helped remove a brand aspect. When you used to turn on your PC, on the start screen while everything’s booting up, we would incentivize PC manufacturers to show the brand of the processor that you had. So if it was Pentium, you saw a Pentium logo come up in the beginning. Obviously there’s money associated with all of those things, as you can imagine. But there was a lot of pushback on that because then you’re even taking away… when I turn on this device you’re seeing Intel, it’s not a PC manufacturer logo or you’re seeing both. Which again goes back to your brand equity. I remember just being in the conversation… so it would come up every year, “We want to get rid of this splash screen” (we called it a splash screen). And we kept saying, “No, no, no. Intel wants to keep the splash screen.” And finally, what came back was consumers are viewing the splash screen as you preventing them from using their PC, even if it’s only for two or three seconds, you are slowing it down.

That resonated to us at a brand level of, “Wait a minute, we stand for performance, quality, trust. We don’t want to prevent people… or the perception (And by the way, it wasn’t slowing anything down because it was Microsoft booting up the OS and all the other stuff that goes on) that Intel is holding them back from their experience.” Removing that, then the PC manufacturers have… that’s one less thing from a brand equity. But you’re right, you could say they made a deal with the devil.

I don’t like to look at it that way because I like to say, “Hey, if a PC manufacturer did not have that Intel sticker on, that a consumer may not choose them to begin with. It may not even be in the choice set.” So I view it as it helped both. But certainly I can see from the side of, if I’m sitting at a PC manufacturer going, “Wait a minute, what brand am I trying to get across? What do I have to have people believe?” But at that point Intel had grown so large, it was a top 10 brand, the shine was helping.

Holly: So I have a question I’ve got to ask now. Thinking about the customer lifecycle… because Merlin, you’ve done a great job in this conversation of bringing that end user back into the picture, where it’s kind of easy to forget about them as we unpack the mechanics of the choices we’ve made… How is a brand like Intel supposed to stay on the customer’s radar screen?

Granted, I understand that your customers were the PC makers, but if we think about that end user. When they buy that PC, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s a set it and forget it sort of situation. And Microsoft Windows suffered from that a little bit too. You bought it, you believed that it was the right thing, you invested in it, it’s in your computer – good. Now you’re not exactly inviting Microsoft and you’re not inviting Intel to continue to have a relationship with you for the next couple of years, right?

Merlin: Gosh, there’s so much in there too. So one, a couple of things. We had always tried to figure out if there was a way for us to understand who the end customers were so we could have some kind of dialogue or relationship with them over time. And, as you say, once you buy a PC, you’re not in the market to buy another PC. You don’t want to do it to be a bother or a pest, because everybody’s inundated with so many things.

So I think that that’s something that all brands probably struggle with. How do you make that happen when you’re not in that active… even from a funnel perspective? Because you start with awareness. Well, when do I care about awareness? Well, when someone’s in the market for starting to look at something. And for PCs, at least the research showed, it was like six months ahead of time before they purchased, people were starting to do research on it. So you wanted to be there, but not three years before.

Holly: Right. You can’t afford to disappear. I think it’s challenging for those of us in brand because that is truly a challenging ROI story, right? I cannot give you back one for one or even, you know, half for one. Although if you pull it away, you will suffer.

Merlin: And I will even add to that, you won’t suffer right away, you’ll suffer later.

Holly: Lagging, yeah.

Merlin: It’s going to take time for you to see it suffer. Which is the problem with the whole model because you’re going to be with business people who are probably writing the checks, so to speak, to the marketing group- “You can afford… I’ll fund this much work.” And you can’t say, “Well, you took this away, therefore it fell apart tomorrow.”

Holly: That’s right.

Merlin: You may not see that effect for a year. It may be two years because if you’ve built up your… we always called it like our bank of goodwill… If your bank account of goodwill is so great, you can afford not to maybe do things and kind of draw on that. But at some point you deplete it. And then what do you do? Because putting money back in that account is really expensive.

Gabriel: Merlin, we were talking about the evolution when you were able to humanize the brand. One of the things that then you were able to do as well was to bring the brand into experience. Can you talk a bit about that?

Merlin: Yeah, so a couple of years later actually we went, with a new CMO, into more of how do we talk about Intel driving experiences that people not only like, but would understand. So again, as the magic of technology takes off… and what I mean by that meaning, people just think technology works, right? They don’t need to know all the ins and outs and everything else… how does Intel stay relevant?

Well, as the world goes to experiences, right? And we hear this every day, right? Everybody’s looking for a good experience. How do you make Intel relevant in that world? So talking about the experiences that Intel is part of and making it come to life. So we had a CMO that really took that to heart. We sponsored the Olympics and we did a lot of things with Olympics. So showing how Intel technology helps bring the Olympics to life in a better way.

Holly: It’s good storytelling.

Merlin: Yeah, Intel also did some work with the NFL and other stadiums with some interesting technology that allowed you to experience games – tennis matches, football games, soccer – in a different way, that was really kind of unique and interesting. So trying to look at all of the experiences that people had. Even going down to maybe like autonomous driving, right? To show that Intel now is inside, not just a black box, but at a more ethereal level where Intel is inside this experience, and it’s actually making this experience possible. So that was kind of a natural evolution.

Holly: Merlin, sorry, I got excited there, I had to jump in. I think you are drawing out for us a really critical lesson. If brands are interested in sponsoring or partnering, in that when you think about the difference between a logo in a stadium… which is forgettable and ignorable. There might be impressions and you might have frequency of seeing it if you’re a fan of the Atlanta Braves and you’re always seeing that same sign… but what you’re talking about there is actually understanding how an experience that you’re having, or want to have, is made better because of your product. And so the tennis fans don’t just show up and see Intel there at Arthur Ashe Stadium, they’re actually understanding how this product plays a role within tennis. Or you show up to Formula One and it’s like, “Oh my God, I had no idea that the drivers and their engineers are using it in this way. That’s so exciting.” It’s cool storytelling, it has to do with what you’re living.

Merlin: It’s cool storytelling that’s relevant to what people are interested in from an experiential perspective. Now, the challenge still remains of, “Why are you telling me this?” or “Why is this relevant to me in my life?” Great. I’m having a better experience at a football game – okay. Having a better experience at a tennis match – What does that mean? It goes back to that brand perception.

We talked about this earlier, you want people to be feeling good about your brand, you want them to understand what it means. Here again, leader in technology, that comes to the forefront. Certainly this reliability and trust aspect of it – if you see this everywhere you go, “Wow, well if the NFL’s trusting them to do this (or soccer, whoever…Olympics) then this has to be good.” That again fills up that account that then when somebody goes and was looking for a PC, they go, “Intel. Okay, wow, you know what? I have heard of them. I know that they’re part of these great things.” That can help me make a purchase decision.

From a corporate brand perspective, you have to be able to say, “This is how I’m going to touch these people and they may not be buying a PC tomorrow (in fact, the majority of them aren’t going to be), but this is what will help us later.”

Gabriel: And then what about some of the things that you created yourselves? Talk about Intel Gamer Days.

Merlin: Yeah, so Gamer Days came out with… it actually was a two-fold business problem. One, we had competition coming up that people (gamers) thought may have better technology than Intel. And two, we know that gamers buy PCs during certain times of the year. So there was a time of the year where it was really dead and nobody was buying anything.

So we said, how do we create something that addresses hopefully those two issues? If not both, certainly the first one, which is how do we convince gamers that we are part of their world – we know them better, trust our technology. Like this is the one you want to bet on when you’re buying that gaming PC. And by the way, gaming PCs, for those people who are not in that world, are very high-end PCs, right? They’re the top of Intel’s stack from a consumer perspective. We want to sell more of those.

So we came up with… and I have to say it comes back to Amazon Prime Days, right? So Amazon Prime Days had just started. It was small, but it was taking off… so we said, “Okay, how do we create a gaming event for gamers (and this was in the U.S.) that showed that we cared about them, we understood their world?” And what this event was, it wasn’t just a sales event, it was an experiential event.

What we did was we worked with our PC manufacturers and retailers and we said, “Okay, to become part of this event you have to offer something that’s an experience. Yes, we want you to offer discounts on PCs, but we’re going to promote these great experiences that gamers can win or take advantage of.” So think about… a PC manufacturer said, “You can come in and see this gaming team that practices in a special facility. We’re going to offer you a tour behind the scenes – normal gamers would never see how professional gamers actually train.” For those who don’t know, there’s actually a thing. There’s professional gaming teams and they have special facilities where they go and they train every day. It is just like a sport. So we’re going to show people that side of it.

We had other things where you could win a stay. We worked with Caesars Entertainment and we outfitted a suite in one of the hotels in Las Vegas – I think it was at the Rio. And it was a full gaming suite. So it was this beautiful suite with its own private pool, but we set it up with a T1 line for internet, and you could come in and you could game here, and you had a great gaming experience in Las Vegas for a weekend. We had just all sorts of different things where you could work with artists, and you could custom design a special design for your PC. A lot of them are very modified, and they have custom artwork where you could work with an artist and get your artwork done.

So we really tried to do things that were experiential, that were part of the community, to show that we understood and cared about what they cared about. And to be part of this program, you had to offer an experience. So we had, at that point, I think their first Gamer Days, I think we had 29 PC OEM suppliers/retailers as part of this ecosystem. They all had to offer something as well as special discounts. And then we bucket it under Intel Gamer Days and created… and I will say again, it was a lot of risk taking. We didn’t know how well it was gonna work, if at all… but the results were phenomenal. And we had not only an increase in sales, but an increase of Intel brand perception as well. So it really did meet all of our KPIs and metrics and more.

I’m happy to say that it actually took off from an Intel perspective. It is now Intel Gamer Days around the world. It is still going on. It’s now, I think, maybe up to like a decade of Gamer Days… I have to go back and look at the dates.

We were always concerned with, are we just pulling in sales we would normally have anyway later? That’s the age-old game, and it obviously took us months to come up with the answer because you have to look at what happened three months later, four months later… you know, did those sales then tank because people already bought them? But what we found was it didn’t. So we knew we were bringing new people in to buy in a new time. So really phenomenal results.

It’s still going on very strong. They’ve morphed it now to do all sorts of new experiences and different ways to show that Intel is part of the community. They do some givebacks — they work with the gaming community to give back to some specific charities and other foundations to help folks. So really just tremendous stuff that was done.

One other thing that comes to mind too that we did. We outfitted some schools with new gaming PCs so kids could have access to PCs. They also were gaming PCs, but they were PCs as well. So to kind of help the next generation of folks come up and get used to Intel technology and using Intel PCs.

And this is what’s interesting about a gamer, because they may not really know all the stuff but they’re interested in it, and they’re interested in hearing about it from other gamers. What we call gaming elders, these are people that gamers went to to ask, “What PC should I buy? What technology should I have? What’s really important?” It was really important for those folks to be able to say, “You want Intel.” So there were a lot of things going on from a consumer perspective and understanding the personas.

Again, going back to knowing your consumer. Knowing the personas, the psychographics. Who’s asking who for what? Where does the influence lie? And in that case, at that time, when we started it, it wasn’t Intel necessarily telling the messages or our competitors telling the messages. It was other people that these people trusted, right? To then say, “Here’s what you really should buy.” So really powerful stuff. Yeah.

Holly: You reached the top of the rainbow, like the top of the brand arc, my friend. In terms of how we see someone’s relationship to a brand evolve from, you know, it’s just there, it’s a commodity, “I don’t care if I get Crest or Colgate or whatever.”… which is not true by the way, but just as an example… all the way up to the top of the arc, which is, you know, I defend you under all circumstances, I understand you, and I actually promote your brand. Like it’s the super ambassador.

Gabriel: In the 11 years I’ve been here at Monigle, there’s a principle that we’ve stood by that has never failed us. And it’s this idea that we don’t pretend to be experts at everything.

And honestly, we warn clients actively about agencies that do say they’re good at everything. And so what that means is when we’re asked if we can help with some PR or with some digital marketing or with some media buys… we have people who’ve done that kind of work, but just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. We know it’s going to get to a point where we’re going to get called out on it.

And so we’ve identified over the last couple of years… through a combination of having a lot of conversations and meetings, and luckily working on some active opportunities and clients… some tier one partners across the areas that are most common for us to have those natural synergies. So in the areas of media, in the areas of PR, in the areas of digital design, and then some industry-specific partnerships as well. Also some integrated marketing and advertising for when clients want a lot of that kind of always-on integrated activation. And we try and work now in a seamless way.

Holly: That’s right.

Gabriel: From our perspective, we would be happy, at any point, to jump in and help any other partner with work, even if it’s for the type of brand work that we do for them. Because I think that’s what this network is about. You’ll be amazed at, once you start to build some of those relationships and have those conversations, what’ll come out of it.

Ultimately, we believe that there isn’t a single new business opportunity that can’t be made stronger by a shared insight, a data point, a connection, or just a better idea. And if we work together more in that way, in this network, we all win.

Holly: Great point, great wisdom.

Gabriel: Well, thank you for joining us. I hope you enjoyed that episode with Merlin Kister and we hope to see you on the next episode of Brand Enabled. Please send us your comments, send us your questions. We hope you’re enjoying the new series and the people and the brands that we’re talking to. See you later.