Channelling “Intel Inside” to improve the brand recognition of your OSS

During Intel’s marketing of “Intel Inside” they taught consumers to look for the Intel Inside logo as an assurance of quality. Consumers eventually came to see “Intel Inside” as a standard and began asking the question: “Why doesn’t your product use Intel processors?” This standard became so important that today it is one of the world’s largest co-operative marketing programs,where hundreds of computer companies license the use of the Intel Inside® logos.
The ingredient must be highly differentiated in order to add value to the overall brand. This means the ingredient should have a separate name and logo and overall purpose, because the added value comes from the extra identity. First and foremost, brands should not create confusion in the market. The main brand should be well established in the market before employing an ingredient branding strategy because the consumer needs first understand the core brand and then find additional value in the ingredient
.”
From an article about Ingredient Branding on Disenthrall.co.

When you think about the chips inside the multitude of electronic devices you own and use, how many brands could you identify? How many chipsets are differentiated enough to sway your decision on the device itself?

According to FastCompany, “If one thing distinguishes Intel’s innovative thinking, it is their 1990s strategy of branding a semiconductor chip as a valuable feature that consumers would look for when they purchased a computer. The campaign’s two decades of ubiquity make us forget this now, but at the time it was an incredibly novel approach to marketing. People bought computers because of the software, the specs, or a friend’s recommendation. Who cared about who made some tiny chip inside the box that you couldn’t even see?
But with the proliferation of PCs, and with consumers at a loss in trying to figure out what made one better than the other, Intel saw an opportunity, and so it took a major risk. Intel’s leadership was convinced this was the way to grow market share…

The “Intel Inside” initiative has arguably been the most successful ingredient marketing exercises in history. They’ve made the invisible visible.

To many users/customers, the achievements of our OSS are invisible, with other components getting the credit for outcomes that are heavily underpinned by our OSS. The challenge for us, just like Intel, is to differentiate and improve the value of our brand. We get the flak for when things go wrong (often through no fault of our own), but we rarely get the credit for the things that work – for the services activated, for the problems resolved, for the equipment ordered, for the new services enabled, for the insights gleaned, etc.

The question for us all is how to make those accomplishments, that differentiation, the brand value visible. [Note that I’m referring to the brands of internal OSS suites here, not just external vendor products]

If we think about making the invisible visible to key execs / sponsors / stakeholders, we need to think about how they tend to interact with OSS. I would surmise that in most cases they interact via reports. Assuming you’re confident that you’ve nailed the content of your reports, that they’re succinct and valuable to those stakeholders, is there any reason why we couldn’t put our equivalent of the “Intel Inside” badge on the reports?

But first, are you confident that the badge is a badge of honour? Will your brand instil in customers a sense of quality, assuredness and innovation?

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2 Responses

  1. Maybe my view of OSS 10 years ago was a bit too close to the technology, but back then it felt like the ‘Inside’ ingredient was Oracle. If you had carrier-grade OSS, you used Oracle. Now though…. Not so clear cut. Far more likely that Big OSS will build a bespoke solution using any number of open source components

  2. Hi James,
    That’s definitely true.
    Yours is a slightly deeper angle than I was thinking and a very good one!
    As well as thinking what’s the “Intel Inside” our OSS, what’s the “Intel Inside” (ie our OSS) the businesses that help them prosper?

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