Circular Logic

Intel and the Return of Branding

Intel is rumored to be revising and re-launching their famous "Intel Inside" branding campaign next week.

Not everyone agrees with this strategy. Adrants has a particularly scathing review.

A few years ago, back when the hoopla of the internet was reaching a fevered pitch, the world seemed to revolve around "branding." Everywhere you looked there were branding companies, branding gurus, brands to watch. It was an era when attaching your company's name to a public monument -- say, a sports stadium -- or blowing your entire annual advertising budget on a Superbowl spot was seen as smart branding. It was the era when marketers tatooed babies' foreheads, gave away cars painted in garish logo colors, and renamed entire towns in order to secure that most precious commodity: a memorable brand.

Fast forward a few years. Branding became a dirty word. No one wanted a brand; they wanted to stop the bleeding. If you didn't have a specific plan to bring in leads and close deals, there was a nice spot on the RIF list waiting for your branded ass. ROI was king (pun intended).

However, it seems we're drifting back to a branded world. Perhaps this is inevitable when products are either commodities (computers, chips, soda) or in vaguely defined markets (most software, PDAs, digital televisions, etc.) Today, in the shadow of Google (or, in today's web vernacular, the "long tail") and among a proliferation of wacky startup names known mainly among internet insiders and their VCs, things are coming full circle.

Regardless of what Intel does next week, it seems we're still just looking for a good way to know what's inside.

With Us or Against Us

Is it better to truly communicate, or to truly appear to communicate?

The question is top of mind for me as our company is on a mission to enhance internal communications. Not technically part of my team's responsibility, but I get pulled into the discussions from time to time. You'd think blogs would be on the agenda, but so far there isn't much support for the idea. "Just have an email sent from the CEO on a regular basis," seems to be the sentiment. Can anyone say 1950s?

Speaking of the 1950s...Russian bureaucrats in the time of Stalin came up with the propaganda-driven idea that all published works should adhere to a socialist realist aesthetic. It was the unquestionable rule that writers and artists had to follow.

Of course, any writer with half an ounce of creativity (and courage) tried to write in such a way that state censors didn't realize what was really being communicated. Others simply self-published with the hope of underground or foreign distribution (samizdat and tamizdat) or even for the drawer, hoping for better times. We owe Dr. Zhivago to such subversion, as well as a host of truly spectacular Russian literature of that time (The Master & Margarita, Sandro of Chegem, Solzhenitsyn's expose of the gulags, etc.).

Although it may feel like a gulag at times, I realize that PR and corporate communications in Silicon Valley is a far, far cry from the literary frontier. The only real threat we're under is termination -- and thankfully not the Soviet or Roman kind.

Doublespeak and misinformation have always been with us, but you'd like to think that the negatives would outweigh the positives. When corporate leaders are more concerned about the appearance of communicating rather than actually engaging in communication, you end up with a naive kind of hypocrisy. Naive because they think they are doing good. Hypocritical because they have no intention of actually listening to anyone. And that, in turn, can lead to a fatal loss of credibility. LBJ anyone? Or Bush?

Not exactly a model for good internal communications.