Back in April and May 2022, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon was running print ads in India.
Now, in June 2022, Mediatek is running a campaign in India, again, through print ads!
Not just that – Mediatek is also running online campaigns through online mobile-centric publications.
The question, as a consumer user of smartphones, and not of the chipsets that go into a smartphone, is this: why target me, the end-user?
Of course, there is a very, very famous precedent for what is called ‘ingredient marketing’ – Intel’s pioneering and mega-successful campaign, ‘Intel Inside’.
The campaign was launched in 1991 with a marketing budget of about US $250 million! The OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) partners were supposed to add the ‘Intel Inside’ logo unit on the product and in all their product advertisements.
Intel, in turn, announced a 6% discount on its microprocessors for the OEMs, which would then be transferred into the partner’s advertising budget. This amount paid for up to 50% of many OEMs’ advertising.
I got to know about Intel’s considerable investment into its OEM partners’ marketing communication much later in the late 2000s during my PR agency days. I had the opportunity to work with a couple of such OEM partners and they used to tell me about the kind of monies they received from Intel for the OEM marketing programs, in the form of events, advertising, and direct marketing!
By 1992, over 250 OEM partners had coopted into Intel’s campaign, offering the Intel Inside logo unit into their marketing communication prominently.
If you remember the many TV ads that the OEMs aired during the peak of that campaign—and for a very long time after that, even as recent as the last decade—the Intel Inside logo and the unique audio signature used to start the ad. After that logo and tune, the actual OEM ads began!! Here’s an example:
With the Intel Inside campaign, Intel transformed itself into a consumer technology product company, beyond being an engineering company! Intel had created direct communication with end consumers even if it did not have a consumer product – it only worked with companies that made consumer products (the OEMs).
To be sure, this could then be applied to any other kind of ‘ingredient’ company.
Imagine GE creating a ‘GE Inside’ campaign and working with diagnostic testing centers and hospital chains across India to place that branding prominently outside their outlets.
Imagine Kohinoor Basmati Rice working with restaurants across India to place the ‘Kohinoor Inside’ branding outside the outlets to inform people that the rice-based dishes made in the establishment using only Kohinoor Basmati Rice.
Imagine Infosys working with banks across their BFSI clientele to add an ‘Infosys Inside’ campaign outside all branches, to inform people that Infosys is managing the bank’s technology. (On second thought, this may not be a good idea given the company’s bungling of the Income Tax portal. Please replace Infosys with TCS, given the latter’s competent work with the passport office system).
Imagine… you get the idea, right?
What Intel did in the name of ‘ingredient marketing’ was not just inform end consumers about the ‘ingredient’ that is crucial to the performance of a product they are considering. It went beyond that – Intel actually led consumers to trust the OEM’s product because of their marketing communication. It was part user education, part consideration-building.
People always had a choice – at the time of Intel’s campaign, they had a choice to buy a laptop that had AMD-based processors. But because Intel took the lead to advertise a processor—that is otherwise sold only to the OEMs—consumers felt comforted by a very basic fact: “If the processor is advertising so openly about their product even to me though I’m not ever going to buy directly from Intel, it must be a really good product, after all!”.
Now, on the back of that campaign, consider the new consumer-focused campaigns by Snapdragon and Mediatek.
There is no cohesive branding like Intel Inside.
There are no OEM partner names – in fact, if you look at the advertising from the smartphone manufacturers, they mention the name of the chipset like any other ingredient within the device.
A considerably better example of ingredient marketing, along the lines of Intel Inside, has been attempted by the camera brands! A good example is a recent tie-up between OnePlus and Hasselblad.
Instead of the (camera) ingredient becoming one of the many features of the phone, it is highlighted as the highlight, creating a specific pull factor on its own. (It’s a different story that the reviews have consistently called out this tie-up between OnePlus and Hasselblad as largely pointless to the quality of the camera).
But in the case of the camera brands (many other partnerships exist on these lines – Xiaomi is rumored to be working with Leica for a new range of phones, Nokia has worked with Zeiss in the past, and so on), they are consumer brands themselves and have communicated directly to end users on their own. It’s just that many of these camera brands had a smaller, niche portfolio of products targeting high-end buyers. And they perhaps stand to gain from the marketing partnership too, to be recognized by user segments that they are not targeting otherwise at all in their own marketing.
As my experience of working with the OEMs reveals, the success of ingredient marketing perhaps boils down to two factors:
1. The amount of money that the ingredient-maker not targeting end-users is bringing to the equation, and
2. Who stands to gain more from the brand names being touted
At this point, seeing the kind of marketing communications by both Snapdragon and Mediatek, it feels like they are merely in a ‘user-education’ phase, and not in a full-fledged ingredient marketing phase. Perhaps once they have done enough/adequate user education and if that translates into buyers consciously opting for a phone that holds a named-brand chipset, then they’d have better leverage to get smartphone brands to highlight the chipset as THE selling point. Right now, that does not seem to be the case. Nor are the chipset brands throwing money into the equation to get such prominent positioning in the marketing communication efforts of smartphone manufacturers.
On that note, recall my post from February this year, on unusual brand partnerships. Among the many other pandemic-induced partnerships, the connecting link was ingredient marketing – Zoom and F1, Lyft and Tinder, Unilever and OYO, Unilever and Uber, Tripadvisor and Lysol, Hilton and Lysol, among others!
In all these partnerships, the communication was primarily using public relations, not advertising. And such communication focused extensively on one brand selling the other as a unique named advantage for the end users even as both the brands in the partnerships were consumer-facing brands!
But in the case of chipset makers, they are forcing themselves to be seen as consumer brands even as they clearly are not. That tactic worked for Intel because they paid their way through the partnership and gain visibility through sheer money muscle. In fact, Intel made sure that their user-education phase coincided with their money muscle. The Snapdragons and Mediateks of the world don’t seem to be using that model, neither are they attempting comprehensive branding the way ‘Intel Inside’ was coined.
It feels that all they want out of this campaign is that consumers recognize and recall the chipset when it is being mentioned among the many features of a new smartphone. They seem content not being THE criteria to pick up a new phone, the Intel positioned their processors within laptops.
The other incidental similarity here is the relative price-based perception that Intel vs. AMD had at that point. Intel-based laptops were mostly costlier than AMD-based laptops, the way Snapdragon-based phones (usually flagships) now are compared to Mediatek-based phones (usually mid-range models).