Intel’s Chief Marketing Officer Eric B. Kim and CEO Paul S. Otellini are planning a sharp departure for Intel. Essentially, they are planning to blow up Intel’s brand, the fifth-best-known in the world, according to BusinessWeek. Kim and Otellini are planning to do away with Intel Inside, the Pentium brand, and the widely recognized dropped “e” in Intel’s corporate logo. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove approves, saying that the plan, “strikes me as one of the best manifestations incorporating Intel values of risk-taking, discipline, and results orientation I have ever seen here. I, for one, fully support it,” according to BusinessWeek. “Otellini will unveil the new strategy and new products on Jan. 5, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Central to the effort will be the first new corporate logo in more than three decades and a $2.5 billion advertising and marketing blitz, BusinessWeek has learned.”
“Otellini will unveil the new Intel during his keynote speech. It starts with a whole new look for the 37-year-old company. The Intel Inside logo will disappear, replaced by an updated Intel logo with a swirl around it to signify movement. For the first time since the early 1990s, the company will add a tagline: ‘Leap ahead,'” BusinessWeek reports. “Meantime, the famous Pentium brand will be slowly phased out. In its place: a troika of brands, two of them freshly minted. Viiv (rhymes with “alive”) is the name of a new chip for home PCS, designed to replace your TiVo, stereo, and, potentially, cable or satellite set-top box. It will be able to download first-run movies, music, and games, and shift them around the home. Intel also will launch a set of notebook PC chips under the three-year-old Centrino brand, as well as so-called dual-core chips, which will put two processor cores on one sliver of silicon. The new brand ‘Core’ will be put on products that don’t meet the specifications of the Viiv or Centrino platforms. The effort is winning high-profile support. On Jan. 10, Apple Computer Inc., which has never used Intel’s chips before, is expected to be one of the first companies to offer products with the dual-core chips.”
“Otellini’s Digital Home team has struck some of the biggest content deals to date with major Hollywood players and music services to entice both customers and consumers to the Viiv platform. The hundreds of millions it will dole out for marketing Viiv has partners like Sony and Philips Electronics (PHG ) salivating,” BusinessWeek reports. “Otellini also has gone to great lengths to win over marketing maestro Steve Jobs. It’s quite a reversal. For years, [former CEOs] Grove and Barrett pooh-poohed Apple as a niche company whose products had sleek form, but nowhere near the function of computers with Intel’s chips. Yet Otellini set about wooing Jobs almost from the start. In June, a month after Otellini took over, the two companies announced Apple would begin shipping Macs and other products with Intel chips inside in 2006. Otellini aims to use the Apple relationship to force PC makers to step up their innovation. ‘They’ve always been a front-runner in design,’ he says. ‘As they start taking advantage of some of our lower-power products, that form factor will improve significantly. I think it will help drive a trend toward smaller, cheaper, cooler.’ Jobs’s influence extends beyond design. At Otellini’s urging, Apple’s ‘Think Different’ vernacular is beginning to take root inside Intel. The two chief executives also appear to be developing a real friendship. Intel insiders say they talk regularly. And when Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, visited Silicon Valley in late November, Jobs and Otellini were side by side, hobnobbing with the royals.”
BusinessWeek reports, “Meantime, Intel execs seem open to easing their once ironclad ties to Microsoft. At the start, PC makers will have to use Microsoft’s Windows Media Center Edition operating system to earn the Viiv brand — and Intel’s co-marketing dollars. But Intel says this may not continue, opening the door to Viiv machines with the Linux open-source operating system or even Apple’s. Indeed, Kim says he expects some PC companies to ship Viiv boxes, without Windows.”
There’s a wealth of more information in the full article here.
See Intel’s new logos here.
Advertisements:
• The New iPod with Video. The ultimate music & video experience on the go. From $299. Free shipping.
• Connect iPod to your television set with the iPod AV Cable. Just $19.00.
• The New iMac G5. Built-in camera and remote control. From $1299. Free shipping.
• Apple USB Modem. Easily connect to the Internet using your dial-up service. $49.00.
Related article:
Intel CEO Ottellini: Apple will bring us innovation, uniqueness, leading design – December 30, 2005
Wanted to take a look at Intel’s old logo and looked at my PC’s case to check for the (grrr) sticker, but then I remembered – last time, I wised up and got an AMD and skipped out on Intel.
Take a look at the
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”wink” style=”border:0;” />