Another revolution from Apple? This one’s alive.

Just when you think the god-like product development powers of Steve Jobs couldn’t go any further, he launches a product that creates life itself. Let the hyperbole begin!

Behold: the ChiaPad.

“I really cannot say enough about this latest miraculous, life-affirming, intuitive, and super, super green device, so I will continue to say it for the next 3 .5 hours.”
Steve Jobs at the ChiaPad unveiling

The new device is a joint project between Apple and Joseph products – makers of the classic Clapper and Chia technologies.

The shell of the device looks like an  iPad made of fired clay. But that’s where the similarity ends, because inside, the operating system is pure Chia.

Says Jobs: “You just add water and watch your content grow! It’s that easy.”

Apple officials were quick to dismiss as “fuzzy headed” the critics who have called the device a “closed ecosystem” that can only grow plants approved and sold by Apple.

And they also insist that while the ChiaPad might seem similar to several other devices on the market, the red clay is actually terracotta, and definitely not adobe.

“This changes everything you thought you knew about touch-sensitive herbal neo novelty technology,” says Jobs in the Webcast of the launch.

His demo was of course greeted with rapturous self-flagellation by Apple fans worldwide and long lineups at Apple stores, even though the product does not actually ship for several months.

Other features:

• Herbal, organic and fully biodegradable.
• Rain tolerant for true cloud computing.
• Familiar interface for millions of iSod users.
• Clap on. Clap off.
• Thousands of apps available like Herb 2007 office suite, iMow, and Farmville – Monoculture Edition.
• Battery cannot be removed, and don’t even mention Flash.
• If you order NOW, we’ll throw in a second ChiaPad at no extra charge along with Ginsu Knives, a new ChiaPhone (data plan not included), and a Chia Head Steve Jobs (right).

The true job of “packaging” (hint: it’s not just to wrap stuff)

Beg to Differ is focusing on a great blog post today by Seth Godin which asks a question we all need to ask ourselves: “does your packaging do its job”? But of course when Beg to Differ (and Seth)  thinks about “packaging” we don’t mean a disposable wrapper…

Image (uncredited) from sethgodin.typepad.com

Mmm. The Land of Chocolate.

Okay, I don’t always agree with Seth. Actually I almost never agree with him when he talks about product naming (Squidoo?!?) or brand architecture (Apple’s  iMac / iPod / iPhone convention sloppy?!?). But today he’s dead on in his assessment of the packaging for the chocolate product above, from the company Madécasse (pronounced mah – DAY – cas).

Now, you may look at it and say to yourself: hey! That’s not bad. It’s actually really well designed. And you’d be right: it’s a simple, elegant design that looks like craft-made – and probably expensive – chocolate. And again. You’d be right. You’d also be right if you noticed the effective use of repeated elements across the packaging, the solid little icon, and the nice differentiating touch of the little ribbon tied at the top.

You might also guess that this is fair trade chocolate. And again, you are a smart reader.

All very nice. All very professional. Yay.

So what’s wrong with a nicely-designed package?

Nothing wrong. That is, there’s nothing wrong *if* the design also helps customers to find you quickly in a store full of high end chocolate bars – which is where these bars would be most  likely to be sitting.

Nothing wrong. If your attractive design doesn’t actually act like camouflage – hiding you from their eyes.

Nothing wrong. If your design doesn’t also hide the fact that your product has a very different story (Madagascar chocolate! Made in Africa by Africans!) that could create an emotional bond – if only people could see through the wrapper to you.

Nothing wrong. If you listen to Seth for a moment:

I don’t think the job of packaging is to please your boss. I think you must please the retailer, but most of all, attract and delight and sell to the browsing, uncommitted new customer. – Seth Godin

How about you?

When you think about all the “packaging” around your product, service, or person-brand, are you just following the “nice design” conventions? If so, your package may be actually hiding you from your customers.

Instead, think about how the outer packaging acts as a transparent window to the really important differentiators that for the heart and soul of your product.

Or in Seth’s words:

And like Seth did, I’ll end by wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day. Why not celebrate by sharing a fair trade chocolate bar with someone you love? Even if it’s not well-packaged and clearly differentiated (yet), it’ll make you feel great!

Apparently iPad has been enhancing feature sets for a while….

So of course, Beg to Differ was riveted on Wednesday by “The Big Speech”. No, not the State of the Union Address: it was the unveiling of a new product by Apple that had our attention. And apparently, we weren’t the only ones watching: so were trademark lawyers for several other “iPads”. But will any of it matter for Apple? Read on.

Trying to pad the feminine market?

On Wednesday, our big question was not “what will this miraculous new product be?” Everybody knew that already. It was leaked long ago that it would be a tablet device that would look something like a big iPod or iPhone.

We were watching to see what they would call it.

The “i” naming convention was a given with iMac, iTunes, etc. But would this one become iSlate? iTablet? iShtar? Surely not <gasp> “iPad”?

Nope, iPad it was

The Fujitsu iPad product

Now, we’re fans of Apple branding in almost every possible way, and we lauded the return of Steve Jobs in a previous post. But instantly upon the announcement, we watched the media and the Twitter universe light up with criticism, and some really off-colour humour, about the name sounding like a feminine hygiene product (see the MadTV clip at bottom).

Even more shocking: it turns out that the hygiene connection was just the beginning. Neither the name itself, or the association with products aimed at females, were unique.

Fujitsu has already filed suit based on its own iPad product (above), and several others are out there.

But the one that jumped out at us was the “iPad” product sold by a small Canadian company called Coconut Grove Pads Inc.. It’s a bra insert like the one shown at the top of this post.

But will any of this matter?

In a word: no.

Let’s be clear: I would never advise a smaller client to go with such a name. There are just too many risk factors, as the media have been gleefully pointing out.

But Apple knows this. And they went ahead in spite of it because, well, they’re Apple. Their market awareness is just too big, and the new product just too smart, for any of this to matter.

They will settle with Fujitsu after some posturing by both parties, the Twitter wags will get their “Maxi” giggles, and the bra company will get its moment in the sun.

But most importantly, the name “iPad” will quickly lose its association with MaxiPads and other feminine products.

Why? Because we will all take ownership of the name as the way to refer to the Apple device – which will push all other uses to the back of the collective consumer brain bus.

And in the branding game, that’s what really matters.

What do you think? Are we artificially inflating our opinion? Let us know in the comments!

Bonus: MadTV scooped Apple on the iPad name in Nov. 2007

NOTE: This is very funny – but mildly gynecological humour might be a bit “edgy” for more conservative work environments, so view with caution.

The first Beg to Differ Branding Field Trip.

Last week, I blogged on Beg to Differ about the birth of my son. Thank you all for your best wishes and brilliant thoughts on this incredibly moving experience for my wife and other two kids. But on the silly side of my brain, the whole 3 days in the hospital, I had lines from the classic “Machine that goes Ping” sketch from Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life going through my head. And I was struck by how heavily branded the hospital environment is. So here are a few branding “pings” from the life and death world of the hospital.

The machine that goes Ping - The Miracle of Birth scene from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life

Something completely different

I think Branders need to be students of branding trends, and have a big streak of geekiness. And it’s always best to look at branding practices from an outsider’s perspective. So as a non-medical guy, all these brands were new to me. A few random comments are below.

There’s a surprisingly hard-sell retro throwback feel to a lot of these product names. And in the case of the “V-LOK CUFF” a design style that looks like it came out of the back of a comic book.

Interesting story: at one point, a nurse was putting an intravenous drip into my wife’s arm and asked me to grab what she called an “eye-hand” from the cupboard. I couldn’t find it until she held up a package and I realized she was talking about the “IV3000 1-HAND” above. In our case, the misunderstanding wasn’t serious, but I wonder if that little brand misunderstanding has ever led to more serious consequences. Branding matters!

In a “serious” environment like a hospital, I’d expect muted, understated brand practices – heavy descriptive names and generic product numbers. But I was surprised how many of the product brands seemed to be using edgy or aggressive naming conventions. Notice a small sample of all the “X’s I found in brand names.

I especially like the “Stryker” beds I saw everywhere. Doesn’t that sound like the name of a hero from a cheesey pulp fiction thriller?

In the delivery room, the doctors and medical staff were giddy with excitement to try the  ”Rollbord” (above) which some were trying for the first time. I noticed that they didn’t call it a “SAMARIT” or even a “Samarit Rollbord” – even though the names are presented graphically at the same size. “Rollbord” is the dominant brand because it’s more useful.

This confused me. In the age of H1N1, I was diligently keeping my hands washed, and when I couldn’t, I would Purell them (note the verb).  But the distributor of the hand-pumps above obviously tried to standardize the look and feel of the labels, even though they are different brands (and add French for a Canadian audience). The result? I kept reaching for the Purell when I needed soap and vice versa. In this case, the manufacturer’s branding would have been more useful.

What do you think?

Beg to Differ wants to hear from you:

• Any thoughts on these brands? What other branding trends do you see?
• Any perspectives on other medical industry brands?
• Do you like the branding field trip idea? Thoughts on other field trips we can take?
• Volunteers to lead guest expeditions?

Part 3 of our series on our favourite posts of 2009″

October and November held a few more pleasant surprises for us here at Beg to Differ – from our Chicken Sandwich series to our first Slideshare cross-over hit, to  a Seussian Twitter phenomena, we continue to be surprised by the enthuisiastic response of our readers – but almosrt never in ways we expect.

What if restaurants charged like creative agencies? The other side

The branding business: we haven’t have a lot of posts about this topic area… yet. But we felt we needed to respond to a viral video which lampooned clients for not “getting” the value of the work creative agencies do. After all, it takes two to tango – or quibble over a giant invoice.

More on the biz: when branding, look outside;

How to name a chicken sandwich: thoughts for branders

Brand naming: When KFC launched a new chicken sandwich with a name developed by Brandvelope, we took the opportunity to toot our own horn a bit and talk about the process of naming a brand. And the results: our biggest single day tally of visitors as branders came by for a taste of what we do.

More on names:Sorry Shakespeare: names matter;  brandscape – a chicken or egg?

American Airlines meets Mr. X – a tragic tale of brand failure

“Whole brand” thinking: This short post on the failure of a giant corporation to understand  effective customer engagement in the social media era marked the first time a SlideShare deck  of ours reached 2000 hits – and climbing (in response to a tip from  Alison Gresik).

More on this:Toronto Web site fail; Human in five steps; the perils of too much choice; one immutable law

Green eggs & spam: a Twitter poem

Social media: Funny to talk about this one as a greatest hit – because we wrote it in the middle of the current “faves” series – and it’s really still going with more than 100 RTs to date. Basically, we wondered a) what @SamEyeEm would be like on Twitter, and b) what Dr. Seuss might think about the new “ReTweet” feature on Twitter.

More on this topic: Twiterloo; branding explained in Twitterese; “Social Media” needs a new name.

More in this series:

• Tuesday: Beg to Differ highlights from June & July
• Wednesday: Beg to Differ highlights from August & September.
• Thursday: Beg to Differ highlights from October & November (this post).

Oh, and another reminder: please sign up for e-mail updates (on the right) or our RSS feed, so you keep track of our future posts.

Soldiers at attention: awright Twitter conscript, you’ve probably heard that Twitter has finally enabled a feature it calls “Retweet”. Well, after years of hacking together manual ReTweets – cutting and pasting, editing, shortening, and workarounds by Twitter partner applications like TweetDeck, you’d think this would be cause for great rejoicing among the weary soldiers of Twitterland…

We Beg to Differ.

The invention of the ReTweet: Napoleon at Waterloo

What’s an RT?

For those new to Twitter (or with no patience for it), basically “RT” is a convention that arose among Twitter users as a way of sharing and amplifying content from other people that they agree with, find interesting or funny, or that adds to a discussion they’re having in some way. Here’s an extreme example of one message from last night:

Here’s a translation of the post:

• @brianlj read a blog post by Twitter CEO Evan Williams @eV, and wanted to share the link and to let others  know  he disagreed with it.
• He added the hashtag #Save ReTweet which made it part of a public discussion.
• I wanted to share his thought with my followers (I’m @DenVan). So, I copied it and pasted it, and added “RT ” at the beginning, then added a comment at the end “Ditto”.
• Then, my friend @zchamu did the same, crediting me and adding her comment “Me three!”

Think about how incredible that is. Four people’s thoughts are contained in the tiny, tiny space of just 140 Characters. That’s the power of the RT.

The revolution is ugly, but it works

Now granted, to the untrained eye, it looks a bit messy – okay really messy – so we’ve been hoping for some clean-up from the good people at Twitter for a long time. You know, a few simple tools that would respect the power and intent of the RT but would make it easier to use and scan.

But what happened instead? RT activist Dan Zarella puts it well when he says:

In a stunningly disappointing move, Twitter has threatened to completely eviscerate most of the value out of ReTweets by “formalizing” a feeble version of a format that was already well understood and functional for all users involved.

The leader on a high horse

On Tuesday, Twitter head Evan Williams wrote his first blog post since March, “Why Retweet works the way it does”, with these ominous words:

I’m making this post because I know the design of this feature will be somewhat controversial. People understandably have expectations of how the retweet function should work. And I want to show some of the thinking that’s gone into it…

Uh-oh. Bad sign. When a CEO runs to the battlements so early in a communications piece, you can just smell the restlessness in the troops – and not just in the Twitterati, but among the people working at Twitter as well.

He goes on to describe RT as cool, before listing off a number of “problems” that currently exist with the RT convention that, as he puts it, “emerged organically from Twitter users as a way of passing on interesting bits of information”.

The problems Evan Williams lists (in brief):

1. Attribution confusion – hard to tell who the “owner” of the originally tweeted content was.
2. Mangled and Messy – formatting makes message hard to read and author’s intent may be lost.
3. Redundancy – lots of “RePeets”.
4. Noisiness – RT @sycophant RT @wanker Blah blah blah
5. Untrackable – hard to collect RTs of a person or post in one place.

The solution from Twitter :

Let’s say that in the new Twitter RT universe, I wanted to share the incredible insight that Evan Williams actually posted last night (at right), with my followers.

• A single “Retweet” button would appear under his tweet.
• By clicking this, I would instantly create an exact verbatim copy of the original. My followers would see this exactly as @ev had written it, and what’s more, his name and avatar would appear beside them – even if my follower wasn’t following him.
• As the Retweeter, my name would appear in a small footnote on the bottom of Ev’s tweet, but not in the actual Tweet.
• Without any opportunity for editing or commentary, I couldn’t add context for my followers like “Can you believe this?” or “Me too!” or “What is this dude smoking?”.
• No “RT” or other prefix will indicate that the is a ReTweet. Only that small footnote will make it appear different from any other tweet….

Our take: the new ReTweet “feature” needs Re-bwanding

Sorry Evan.

You’re a genius, and we all owe you a tremendous debt for creating this Twitter thing, but this new feature you’ve created is not ReTweet. I’ve called it “RePeet”. Or maybe it’s “Copy” or “Clone”, or as one wag called it “Exact Tweet” (ET – and it phones home to Twitter).

Whatever it is, it’s broken.

And we’re not alone in saying so.
(this list is growing, so please send us more!)

• A great critique from TechCrunch
• The original rant from Dan Zarella
• Andrew Mueller muses on possible Google / Bing search motivators.
• Beth Kanter thinks the new feature will lead to RT bloat (but we disagree)
• RayBeckerman reflects on how he learned to stop worrying and love the RT.
• Alex Schleber on how Twitter doesn’t get the “Social” part of SM
• Lance Ulanoff from PC Magazine in disbelief
• Justine Bateman thinks new RTs are spam.
• Lisa Barone lists all the reasons to hate DUM-RT.

To the battlements! What you can do soldier:

1. Don’t use the new button! Just keep doing what you’ve always done.
2. Use the hashtag #SaveReTweets to register your displeasure.
3. Inundate @ev and @twitter with negative traffic.
4. Sign the petition Dan Zarella has put together.

Company makes dough on the Den while another eats it.

Beg to Differ is going to focus on a beauty and the beast story of two hometown brands that showed up on Dragon’s Den last night, with very different results. One plucky little company made a pile of money from investors, while the other – a much larger organization – wasted a pile of dough. Want to find out more? Of course you do. Read on.

The Beauty: spreading the dough on the Dragon’s Den

Beg to Differ knows that our non-Canadian readers probably won’t be familiar with the Canadian version of this reality TV show where real life entrepreneurs compete to get funding from real-life millionaire business moguls. But it’s a great show, the guest entrepreneurs range from brilliant to insane to just cheesy, and it really helps average viewers get into the entrepreneurial process.

Last night, one of the big winners was the product “Yummy Dough” pitched by Stefan Kaczmarek from Germany and Tim Kimber from Ottawa (who owes me a few pairs of new shoes because my three year old loves his other product PlasmaCar so much).

You can watch episode 5 here and the Yummy Dough product is first up.

If you’re like me, you probably hear “edible” and “modeling dough” and you first think of the PlayDoh most of us grew up with, then you think “YUCK!” Then if you have young kids like I do, you probably also think “I don’t want my kids to eat their PlayDoh!”  But this is pliable cookie dough that you can bake into cookies.

Check out the Yummy Dough site. It tells its story in a fun and compelling way (but make sure you quickly mute the annoying and slightly creepy background noises). One quick positioning note for the owners now that they have some marketing dollars: they need to steer away from the word “clay” and focus more on the “make your own cookies” aspect. It needs to seem like equal parts toy and food product – which will take some careful work.

The Beast: dumping dough on the Dragon’s Den

But another Ottawa-based “brand” is wasting money as fast as Yummy Dough is making it  - probably faster.

Take a look at the screen shot (above) from the Web site, and in particular the sponsor logos in the upper right. You’ll probably recognize the Cadillac insignia. You may be curious about the “Ivey” brand – which is the University of Western Ontario’s school of business (note to Ivey – great name, but negotiate a short tag under your logo with the words “School of Business”).

But unless you’ve directly done business with them or have a family member working for them, you probably won’t know what the letters “E.D.C.” stand for – even if you are Canadian. Yet, EDC has been pumping truckloads of money into season after season of the Dragon’s Den to build brand awareness!

So who the heck is EDC?

Some Hints:

1. Don’t look for it to be spelled out for you anywhere on the Dragon’s Den page. It’s just EDC in the video ads, side banners, and sponsor logos.
2. I’ll give you the “C” – it’s Canada, and yes, this organization is run by the Canadian Government.
3. It is often confused with two other corporations that do similar things and also go by TLAs (Three Letter Abbreviations): BDC and CCC.
4. See if you can find them on this Wikipedia “EDC May Refer to… “ page. And I’ll give you a bigger hint, it’s the 20th EDC on a list of 25 things that call themselves EDC.

Still stumped?

Well, if you’re not baffled, call your brother who works at EDC and tell him what a bang-up branding job they’re doing. If you are, you’ve helped me make a point I’ve made many times here on Beg to Differ:

An abbreviation is not a brand!

Read my July Op Ed from the Citizen with the message "NOMO" useless acronyms!

(Oh, and if you’re still wondering, it’s actually “Export Development Canada” and they do important work – as do BDC (Business Development Bank of Canada) and CCC (Canadian Commercial Corporation). Shame that none of them have real brands…)

Part one of a series on product naming.

So, after months of waiting, the baby is finally here. No, I don’t mean my actual baby – my wife and I are still waiting for the arrival of our third little bundle at the end of November. I’m talking about the new chicken sandwich Brandvelope named for KFC in Canada – which appeared in stores on Friday. Beg to Differ often gets asked what goes into such a process, so as a public service, here are a few insights for brand managers from the Kentucky Fried trenches.

The Colonel calls

When Priszm (the company that manages the KFC brand in Canada for Yum! Brands) called Brandvelope this summer to ask for help naming the new sandwich, they already had a great product in development. The concept of the new sandwich had been pretty much nailed down after several cycles of focus group testing, refinement, and more testing.

We learned that they were launching this new product to be a “hero” – or “flagship” of their line of sandwiches. And we learned that focus group subjects loved the sandwich, but they didn’t love any of the names that had been tested.

Our job: find the right name for the new sandwich.

The sandwich concept:

1. The chicken: fresh, skinless chicken breast fillets breaded in-store with the Colonel’s 11 herbs & spices, then fried on-demand for customers.
2. The extras: fresh lettuce, a sesame seed bun, and peppercorn mayo.
3. The packaging: the product is the only KFC sandwich served in a box, giving it a premium, high-value appeal.

The concept sounded like a winner to us (as a matter of fact, the early concept photos had our mouths watering). But what do you call such a thing?

There are two basic ways to approach naming.

The wrong way: creative first; strategy last.

This is the most common approach to naming. Sit in a room and brainstorm until you come up with the most creative, crazy, or compelling name you can think of, then run with it. This approach can be loads of fun, and usually leads to names that work great for the brainstormers, but not for customers.

The right way: strategy first; then get creative

This is our approach: take some time to understand the context that the new product will be launched into, the “brandscape” around it, and most importantly, what the name is supposed to do. Then and only then do you move to the creative part.

A great name is never just a name; it’s a tool to help people find, understand, and remember products, services, and yes, chicken sandwiches.

What we needed to know before we started:

1. Intentions and strategic goals: what was the impetus behind the launch on the part of the people managing the brand?
2. Customer expecations: what did we know about the hang-ups and desires of the target audience?
3. The Brandscape: what competing products would the new product be compared to and how could we highlight the differences?
4. Brand architecture – how  would the new name complement and contrast the rest of the existing portfolio of products?
5. The unknowns: what additional information did we need, or at least, what were the areas where we’d have to make educated guesses?

The process from there:

So how did we get from these questions to the final name “Big Fresh Chicken Sandwich”?

Good question. We’ll get into more details in a series of blog posts over the next few days. But in the meantime, here are a few “take-aways” to think about.

Thoughts for branders:

• Does your company treat product (or corporate) naming as a creative process first, or do you start with customer-facing strategy?
• Can you answer all five of the areas we needed to adress for KFC above?
• Are you treating your products as individual entities or  as part of a bigger system that helps customers make decisions?
• Are you listening to people outside of your board room when you make such decisions? People who are willing to challenge you and your assumptions?

The Chicken Sandwich Series

1. How to name a chicken sandwich: thoughts for branders (this post)
2. Sorry Shakespeare: names matter – in roses and chicken sandwiches

So yesterday, while Beg to Differ was breaking up with the Intel brand, we got sad news about another old flame:  Saturn is dead. Penske threw in the towel on its attempt to revitalize the brand, and GM is finally shutting Saturn down. We’re feeling sad about that today. We remember when Saturn was promising to be “A Different Kind of Company; A Different Kind of Car.”

As you may have guessed from our name, we like “Different”…

(above) The home page of the innovative "ImSaturn Network" community Web site. Everything looks different... except the cars... and apparently the end of the story...

You can read the whole sad Saturn history at Wikipedia. We’re going to focus on the Saturn brand, and how the promise changed over time, then died, and what brand managers can learn from it.

“I’m sure if everything I read is true, I won’t be disappointed”

Somewhere out there, this third grade teacher from a 1992 Saturn ad (below) must be a bit down today as well. In it, she says she read about Saturn, and makes a personal connection when workers at the company read her letter. If you ever cared about Saturn like us, you have to watch this (Spoiler Alert: it’s really sad in retrospect).

Different worked… for a while.

And I’m sure she was satisfied, for a while.  For her, and for the rest of us that were rooting for the “different” approach from the auto industry, Saturn succeeded at building  1) a “Different Kind of” brand promise, 2) a “Different Kind of” corporate mentality, 3) “Different Kind of” retail experience (no haggling), and 4) a “Different Kind of” tribe of devoted followers. They really did. The vestiges of those things are still around.

For example, Saturn has been much better than most other companies at embracing and building community online. Their fan site ImSaturn u r 2 is really engaging, and their marketing team really gets Social Media. A couple months ago, Beg to Differ was shocked and delighted when @tomfolger and a couple of Saturn marketing folks popped in to a Twitter #Brandjam to correct us when Saturn positioning came up.

Unfortunately the vehicles themselves, the “Different Kind of Car” was only ever marginally different from other cars. But the service commitment became legendary, and at least the cars looked just different enough that you could spot a “Saturn” on the road. If only they had built on their differentness…

But that’s where the story turns sour.

The big problem was, the “Different Kind of Company” was always beholden to the corporate logic of GM – a very un-different automotive behemoth.  So as the Saturn competed more and more with GM core brands, and sales never quite matched expectations, GM had two options:

Option A: Think like a bean counter = differ less:

• The approach: try to fix technical, marketing, and customer service problems by applying the same rusty old car industry logic. Gradually water down the promise and file off the edges, so only the most fanatical still hold on to the hope of Saturn rising again.

Option B: Think like and human being = differ more:

• The approach: Keep renewing the vision by continuing to make the cars even MORE different in ways that customers will appreciate, and keep innovating on the corporate, manufacturing, and customer service fronts (preferably by not having  it be a GM company any more).

Their choice was clear: differ less

Over the 90′s, the cars looked and behaved less and less different from other cars on the road, and by 2000, the line had expanded to include the same-old range from sub-compact to SUV – diluting the core idea of what a “Saturn” was. The passion and excitement of Saturn customers waned – as did their repeat-purchase loyalty.

So by the late ’00′s, when the really big financial meltdown happened, Saturn was dragged down by the gravity of the GM’s collapse. At Beg to Differ, we can’t help but think that stronger differentiation, coupled with the fierce (and geeky) loyalty of those early believers would have carried them through.

The big questions for brand managers:

• Which option are you choosing for your brand – differing more or differing less?
• Are you thinking like a bean counter (internal logic) or a human being (brand logic).
• Are your corporate pre-occupations hampering your ability to deliver on the human promise of your brands?
• If you disappeared tomorrow, would any third grade teachers miss you?

More nostalgia from YouTube.

Japanese language ad: ordinary American country folk buildin’ cars:

Saturn homecoming – playing on the wholesome geekiness of Saturn owners:

An open break-up letter to the Intel brand.

Dearest Intel,

This is hard. We had such a good thing going once, and in a lot of ways, I still love you. But, well, things have changed. You’ve changed.

And I’m afraid you just don’t understand  why… [sniff]

…I no longer want you inside. [sound of sobbing]

The early days

The early days. It all seemed so simple then...

I remember the first time I saw you in that cute little “Intel Inside” logo on the side of a new laptop at Office Depot. Wow. Knock-out.

I remember how you made me feel: safe, secure, like I could be better than ever. But mostly you helped me feel smart, just because you were there. Inside.

And that made everything else so easy. And really, that’s what I loved you for. You made my choices easier because you stamped them with an extra little promise that said “I’ll be there for you”.

And while I’m confessing everything, here’s something else I never told you: I never even knew what an “Intel” was, how it worked, or why it was important! And you know what? I never wanted to. I couldn’t care less about silicone chips or dual-core doodad clock times or whatever. I vaguely knew that those things were important, but because you were there, I didn’t have to worry about it.  You cared, and that’s all I needed to know.

Where it started going tragically wrong

Trouble on the horizon

I think it was Pentium. That’s when I started wondering about us – when you convinced me that just having “Intel” inside wasn’t good enough. No, now it needed to be Intel and Pentium. “Just one other brand” you said. And sure I went along with it. Because I loved you, I put up with that little three-way thing. I even enjoyed it a bit.

At least, I thought, there were limits. Your friend Pentium had the decency to know its place, quiet, complementary, never intruding on your “Intel Inside” area.

But it didn’t stop there. No, then it had to be a Pentium 2, then a 3, then a 4. Always bigger, faster, with more complicated features and power.

And over the years, you found new names to stamp on all kinds of different parts of yourself: Celeron, Centrino, Core, Atom, Itanium, and on and on. Something called Xeon – honestly, was that one even from planet earth?

I couldn’t keep them all straight and I couldn’t tell the difference. But all along I thought: at least I still have my Intel Inside…

Not sure about smart being the new speed, but you sure kept me shifting...

But now, it’s gone too far

Well today I received a flyer from Dell telling me about some new laptop brand, and there, screaming from the upper left corner was one big  massive graphic with your name on it. And if I was confused before, now I’m totally baffled. Now you’re “Intel Core i7 Inside”, with four different type-styles and a litte barf-coloured mosaic-ish thing. I don’t know you any more Intel!

And after all that, you have the gall to tell me: “Look for Intel Inside” and a bunch of randomly placed stars.

Well you know what? I did it: I looked for Intel Inside, and I found… wait for it… nothing.

Sorry Intel, you may still be inside my computer, but you’re just not inside me anymore.

And you know why I’m so angry and hurt? With Intel Inside, you seduced me into caring a little bit about something I’d never wanted to care about before. And it worked. You helped me feel like a smart, informed consumer by giving me a simple tool to feel better about my purchases.

But I never wanted to care more than that. And I will never, ever care about it as much as you do.

So enough already. Get rid of all those other brands, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll THINK about coming back.

No, scratch that. You see? Just for a second you made me want you again. But this time it’s over. [door slams]

Another blogger’s take on the evolution of Intel Inside:

Evolution of Intel inside: from www.lowendmac.com