Brand Power!

At their respective keynotes at a recent conferences I attended in San Francisco, Microsoft chairman and CEO Bill Gates and Apple "interim CEO" Steve Jobs both espoused the power of brand advertising.

To Gates, with his vision of the Web lifestyle still driving The Road Ahead, brand identity is the most important message for a company to deliver with its Web site. Gates claims that Microsoft's Web site is now its primary marketing tool. Actually making money with the Web, admits Gates, isn't easy. "The business model has been difficult. The way you can succeed," Gates told his audience, "is to get your brand out there."

Later, Steve Jobs also touted brand power, as he demonstrated the company's "Think Different" ad campaign. The ads neither show nor talk about computers at all, but instead associate the Apple logo with images of Pablo Picasso, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, Mahatma Gandhi, John Lennon, Amelia Earhart and others the ad characterizes as "the crazy ones, the ones who dare to think different." By associating the Apple brand with geniuses and iconoclastic figures, Jobs hopes to make a bigger impact than is possible by comparing MIPS and megahertz. And, hey, the bad grammar might get people talking, too.

Brand is, of course, about recognition. And, as Microsoft has shown with its Internet Explorer and Windows platform efforts, persistence pays off. As Seybold's vice-president for content development Craig Cline said: "One thing you have to admit about Microsoft - they never quit. They just keep working until they get it right."

Indeed, the company's nascent Windows 2000, now slated for release Feb. 17, 2000, is ample proof of that principle. Now more than five years old, this NT-based OS is finally showing signs of maturity. The company has partnered with graphics heavyweight Adobe to develop the OpenType font format that builds Type 1 and TrueType font capabilities into the OS, and Adobe has helped develop the system's PostScript printer driver. A particularly powerful demonstration of the new Windows 2000 printing architecture allows the user to search for available printers using the system's "Find" command. With Windows 2000, you can specify search criteria to locate all the color printers on the network and then narrow the search to, say, the tabloid-size color printer nearest you. Then, with a right-click, the system installs the printer driver, downloads a color management device profile automatically and you're ready to print! Slick.

Microsoft has partnered with color experts Linotype-Hell to produce this system-wide color management system that Gates says will also extend to Internet Explorer, so that on-line purchases will result in products of the color the customer expects. And, in what is likely to be a damaging blow to Apple's dominance in publishing, Quark has agreed to port its Quark Publishing System - long a Mac-only product - to Windows. With Adobe, Quark and most other major Mac developers already busy producing Windows versions of their product lines, the Windows-based publishing market is poised for significant growth in the over the next six to 12 months, with Windows 2000 and multiprocessor PCs spearheading Microsoft's "Windows: the Platform for Publishing" push.

Gates is convinced that a "Web lifestyle" is shaping the new consumer. Gates cites the automobile and the television as two types of lifestyles that are so ingrained in the fabric of North American culture that we don't even think about it. Gates believes that college campuses are some of the best places to find people who do their banking via the Web, use it to gather information before making major purchases, and so on.

Bill Gates provided some interesting statistics during his speech, such as his observation that about half the installed base of 90 million PCs are already connected to the 'Net. Gates also observed that, in the corporate space, almost half the new machines sold are portables. Nevertheless, he believes that it will be small form factor mobile computing devices (currently numbering about four million) and family room TV-type devices that finally make the Web lifestyle pervasive.

Gates foresees that, within 10 years, natural language, visual user recognition, handwriting input and continuous speech input will be ubiquitous. He also wryly postulated on whether there was an equivalent to Moore's Law (in which the amount of information storable in one square inch of silicon has roughly doubled yearly every year) for digging ditches. The need to dig ditches to lay fiber-optic cable, of course, is one of the major holdups (along with regulatory issues, of course) to the growth of the Internet. Gates says that, at best, ditch digging equipment improves at a rate of only about three to four per cent a year, a sobering thought to those of us used to the rates of growth possible in the computer industry (not the least of which has been Microsoft, which has seen its stock value double this year).

Gates did note, however, that storage devices seem to be following a Moore's Law exponential improvement curve.

Brand Power Tips:

Consolidate your image. If you have more than one logo, pick the best one and stick with it. If your corporate logo was an in-house DIY job, consider having a professional designer do a makeover. A good designer will provide you with templates, Pantone colors and other items that add up to a comprehensive and memorable identity.

Don't underestimate the power of positive association. As Steve Jobs pointed out, "Kinney sells shoes. Nike is about athletics; about success."

Therein lies the power of brand advertising.

For Further Reading:

• The Standard: Guerilla marketing programs and some typical marketing costs for an a "saturation" campaign.