When Intel served up hotter chips to the household
How “ingredient branding” made computer buyers salivate over the sweet silicon cooking within.
Way back in 1991, semiconductor manufacturer Intel was feeling a bit anonymous. Since being founded in 1968 it had largely built its business producing memory chips, before reverting its focus back to something a bit more sexy – the Central Processing Unit or CPU. The microprocessor, the real brains of any computer, promised to have the biggest influence over the rapidly growing hardware market and Intel would be at the apex.
As application software and operating systems (Windows, principally) demanded faster clock speeds and multi-threaded performance, consumers in the 1990’s became far more aware of system architecture. What was “under the hood” (or inside the unfeasibly large tower case) of your desktop PC suddenly gave rise to a new, curious snobbishness. Having an “Intel Inside” would become an unlikely badge of honour, and dare we say it, a kind of… cool?
Designed by Steve Grigg at agency DahlinSmithWhite, the “Intel Inside” logo was simple, blue and circular. Whether silkscreened or stickered onto your shiny new Gateway 2000 or Packard Bell, that comforting swirl told everyone this thing could shift some digits. This was “ingredient branding” and a pioneering campaign for promoting the hidden stuff – the nuts and bolts of a bigger product, the innards, the stuff we really shouldn’t see let alone care about.
To put it into context, think of a car and the ECU chips that run its engine. While most drivers might fetishise a BMW, Audi or Porsche badge on the hood, they aren’t too fussed to boast what’s beneath. If it starts every time and performs like a dream, who cares what individual part or “doohickey” comes from where?
“Intel Inside” was the equivalent of emblazoning “Squirrel ECU” across the bonnet in big blue letters. Ok, not quite, but you get the clumsy analogy...
But they didn’t stop there. In 1994 composer Walter Werzowa put a four-note sequence together (C#, F#, C# & G#) to birth one of the most effective earworms in advertising history. Named the “Intel Spiral” but more popularly known as Intel’s “Bong” this twinkling ditty would provide an enduring audio signature for umpteen TV spots and boot cycles. A kind of fanfare for the discerning nerd, if you will?
Point being, inside this pivotal decade for home computing, these aggressively innovative marketing efforts by Intel worked and worked big style. Buoyed by demand for its Pentium range of CPU’s, the company registered record revenues of $16.2bn in 1995 with not far off double this amount in sales ($29.4bn) announced just four years later.
That’s a lot of “In-tel’s In-side” folks!