Revealing your hidden value

It’s what’s inside that counts

Most users pay little attention to the innards of their digital devices, focusing entirely on sleek external lines and sharp screens and understanding little to nothing of the circuit boards packed with components that make them work. For the typical computer these include a main processor, storage, and short-term memory, plus several chips that allow for communication. These are masterpieces of engineering, reflecting decades of accumulated advances, but few care about that. They just want the product to perform as expected. The technical wizardry enabling it isn’t important.1

For Intel, this was a problem.

The company was an early leader in the design of central processing units, which coordinate a computer’s activities and are largely responsible for overall performance. Yet when deciding to buy the average user didn’t comprehend clock speeds or data throughput, nor were they particularly concerned with the brand name printed on a chip they would likely never see.

They just wanted a system that worked, and brands like Commodore and Compaq built strong identities for providing the newest and best products. As long as no one knew where the processors came from, Intel would remain at risk of being swapped out for a competitor’s product, or maybe having to haggle down margins to stay in the machines if their partners started feeling combative.

This changed in 1991 with a launch of a revolutionary marketing campaign that touted the virtues of having “Intel Inside” your computer. The airwaves were soon blanketed with ads that embedded the virtues of its processors, implying that only the retrograde would buy a PC that lacked one. A few years later the company commissioned an audio trademark to be appended to commercials, creating a recognizable five tone sequence that helped make Intel components as important as the product being advertised.2

Sealing the deal, Intel contracted with computer makers to begin adding its own logo to the outside of their devices. This meant its brand was now jockeying for visibility in the user’s field of view, alongside that of Dell or Hewlett Packard.

By stoking consumer demand directly, Intel started gaining the upper hand over companies that were formerly gatekeepers for customer access—since buyers were looking for Intel processors, they might as well advertise the fact that their products had one. It made the offer irresistible by paying PC manufacturers for brand placement, providing a source of funds that made little sense to refuse.

Intel Inside stickers were soon ubiquitous, and a series of marketing campaigns meant that individual processors themselves received their own sub-brands like Pentium3, which itself became a marketing phenomenon.4 Computer brands might come and go in their tussle for market share, but Intel could seamlessly and consistently sell its products to whichever one was leading in the sales race at the time.

Crashing the gatekeepers

Most organizations are woven into a web of relationships where various parties—customers, suppliers, donors, retailers— have only a portion of the overall voice. Each is constrained in how they can break through to make their value clear. Multiple players compete to direct the narrative or own the customer relationship, using their positions to steer the flow of information and make their own contribution seem indispensable. Winning strategies sometimes involve bypassing them.

Whatever the merits of the unfiltered social media free-for-all that increasingly shapes public discourse, one of the more striking results is how it’s dampened the role of traditional media in gathering information and interpreting events. There’s less need for a press conference when a candidate can just Twitter blast followers in real time with their hot takes.5 Navigating press gatekeepers is a less critical skill when a rising wave of politicians can just engage directly with their grassroots supporters.

This pattern is starting to reshape other areas, like professional services. Large consultancy firms have partnerships that own client relationships, while an army of associates works under them and labors to ascend the pyramid, understanding that few will reach the top. Numerous startups and networks are beginning to nibble at this model, cutting out this overhead layer and providing marketplaces for experts to offer services directly to prospects. This makes it much easier for consultants to be seen by and engage with clients directly, making the specific value they provide much more obvious.

The traditional chip maker might have thought its customer was the computer manufacturer that purchased its processors directly. Aside from the dedicated do-it-yourself crowd very few of us are in the market for a memory module or a Core i7. Intel expanded the definition of its customer to include end users who might not understand the nuances of hardware but could apply demand pressure from the other end of the value chain, creating a pipeline that has kept the profits flowing as the industry evolves.

The one hitch in Intel’s quest for marketing saturation came when it bumped up against Apple, which was finally switching to its processors after working with an alternative custom solution for years. Even though Intel could finally win over this marquee customer, Apple isn’t stupid when comes to iron-fisted control of its identity. They won’t be allowing any crude marketing stickers to sully the cleanly machined aesthetic of their MacBooks, and you’ll never find the Intel Inside tagline in an Apple Store. Apple has even begun to develop and brand its own processors, recognizing that it needs complete ownership of that core element.

Gatekeepers are everywhere, and savvy operators are finding ways to bypass them and speak directly to the end user. The resulting shakeout can reveal just exactly where value lies. In the PC space, several computer manufacturers learned they were mainly viewed as commodity assemblers of components, and their brands weren’t enough to keep the buyers coming. Many of them have since merged or dissolved into bankruptcy. Meanwhile Intel keeps chugging along, deftly navigating each transition, with dominant share that hasn’t been seriously threatened in many years.

If you engage with partners to get to an end user, your own brand is mediated by how that partner engages with you and what messages it passes on down the line. If your value is embedded as part of a larger package, customers might not realize just how much of it specifically comes from your contribution. If you’re confident in your distinctiveness, find ways to share it.

How could you prove your value more directly to those you serve?

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