Early in my career, I was fortunate to work with a very creative PR guy named Patrick Lucci from Boston, Massachusetts. He worked briefly for the semiconductor design firm at which I was marketing communications manager and in that short time, Patrick helped me to understand the importance of “romancing” the marketing message in telling the benefit story of a product.
Semiconductors are the inner workings of those integrated circuit chips you see on the motherboards of your desktop, laptop and notebook computers. The firm I worked for was filled with incredibly talented engineers who, through their knowledge of both analog and digital signal semiconductor design, created the first commercially viable video frequency timing generator. That success spurred the company into its initial public offering in the early days of what would come to be known as the “dot com bubble.” Once the dust from the IPO had settled, the company next set its sights on becoming the first to put sound capability directly on the motherboard via an audio codec chip using wavetable synthesis and real sampled sound.
Sounds pretty technical … and rather unglamorous … so far, doesn’t it? Stay with me, though. There is a reason for all this.
Now, for those of you who may not already know, integrated circuit chips gained semi-rock star status when Intel started to heavily promote their Pentium series microprocessors (the first “Intel Inside” ads). Their popular TV commercials had funky music and people dancing around a staged clean room fabrication facility in multi-colored bunny suits. And here was the brilliant, “out of the box” thinking: Instead of staying strictly business-to-business, Intel took promotion of the Pentium and its “coolness” directly to the consumer, thereby creating heightened consumer demand for Intel’s product over other microprocessors. The OEMs (original equipment manufacturers) complied – they had no choice, really. By selling directly to the consumer, Intel made it fun, even hip, to prefer and demand Pentium-based machines over other manufacturers.
When the time finally came to launch this new codec chip as a product, we asked ourselves … how? IC chips easily became commodities, bought by the thousands by OEMs. Other companies were working to deliver sound on the motherboard as well, but they hadn’t perfected the use of sampled wavetables and used only synthesized sounds. So the first challenge was to differentiate this audio codec from others. Additionally, this codec was a very large chip. Its “footprint” took up a good amount of real estate on a motherboard, so the second challenge was to ensure this audio codec became a necessity in order to have the OEMs invest the board space and enable the sound application.
Patrick’s idea was beautiful and universally appealing in its simplicity: Humanize the technology.
Picture, if you will, a handsome, slender, young professional man, standing in a color-added, sepia-toned background, dressed in a white shirt, dress slacks and tie and holding up the screen of his laptop computer. He smiles lovingly into the screen, which holds the image of a cherub-faced baby, smiling back at the young man through the screen. The screen (and the baby’s face) are on the same level as the young man’s face, providing a strong focal point for the viewer. The headline: “Talk to Me, Baby.”
In a single image, the viewer understood the product’s capability and how it could be of benefit through a powerful application. Even more important was the perception of the young man as a father who was able to not only see his child, perhaps before bedtime, but to also have them hear each other. Suddenly, all that technology had a very human reason for being important to the consumer – and to the manufacturer. The result was profoundly impactful, and even worthy of a company of Intel’s status. The company couldn’t make the chips fast enough.
As mixed signal integrated circuit chip design led to mixed media in and through the advertising and promotion of the Wavedec audio codec, we ”romanced” the technology in its application through the warmth of a very human and universal message — the need for connection between a working father and his child. The message of technology serving a greater purpose delivered in a very believable application was compelling. The result was high acceptance and demand, not to mention an award or two for the ad itself. And sound capability resides on motherboards to this day.
“Romancing” the marketing message advances the creativity of the designers’ end product through promotion of the best, even highest, possible purpose and application of the product. In the end, shouldn’t that be what selling benefits over features is all about?
