24 | Intel inside, Gore Tex
and how "ingredient brands" tell their story.
Perhaps those of you of a certain age remember the Blue Man Group’s turn as spokespeople for Intel, or the chip’s transformative insertion into Homer Simpson’s skull.
Perhaps you’ve got their annoyingly catchy jingle in your head right now.
For some time in the late 1990s to early 2000s, the chipmaker was the world’s most valuable tech company and as ubiquitous as Amazon and Apple are now. Millions around the world grew up knowing that “Intel Inside” meant something better, without really being to articulate how, or why.
But towards the end of the 2000s, powerful mobile phones, not laptops dominated the landscape. And Intel had missed out. When Steve Jobs went to Paul Ortellini in 2005 asking if he might make a less expensive microchip for a new phone/computer/camera/music player Apple was developing, the Intel CEO famously declined.
Intel and its computer chips were on the sidelines of the mobile revolution, looking for a way to maintain relevance. In the fall of 2009, they partnered with Vice to launch The Creators Project, a global platform that repositioned the brand among creatives harnessing tech to make art in different ways, for new platforms. “They asked us how to better connect with young people around the world and to help inspire a more emotional connection to the Intel brand,” recalls friend-of-the-letter Gerhard Stochl, who drove the partnership at Vice for several years. "At the time, Intel’s chips were already in lots of devices, powering all kinds of creative endeavors. It’s just that the majority of people using those devices didn’t necessarily know about it.”
Intel did something rare for a tech company - especially a semiconductor company - and began building a brand universe where product marketing played only a minor role. The Intel logo was prominent along with the Vice logo on content and events, but that was the limit to the overt marketing.
“Young people didn’t care whether content or experiences were 'branded' or not, you just had to be honest about it and, most importantly, they had to be good,” Gerhard told me when I caught up with him earlier this week. “We wanted to use the technology to showcase something humane. All the creatives we worked with represented that approach. And the live event series was about touch and feel, about experience. That was especially important.”
Intel and Vice toured a rolling Creators Project festival around the world for several years, that featured large-scale installations by artists like Chris Milk, Mira Calix, and Rafael Rozendaal, alongside workshops, screenings, talks and performances by the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, and Florence & the Machine (free of charge) A giant interactive glowing LED cube — crafted by United Visual Artists and powered by Intel technology — represented perhaps the pinnacle of the collaboration story.
Successful brands have an aspect of unpredictability to them. And for an “ingredient” brand staring down the reality of eroding relevance, Intel’s moves answered the brief so well, The Creators Project became a global movement. Their product story is uninteresting to a broad audience, but its brand promise is vital to the partner brands that pay tens of millions to license them. Lenovo needs Intel inside to mean something to someone if they’re going to charge an extra $500 for an Intel chip-powered laptop. LG needs Dolby to do the same.
Below, another brand facing this challenge.
Gore-Tex 🧤 The OG performance fabric has successfully defended its head start since it was invented in 1969. Gore Tex’s chief innovation (arrived at by chemical engineer Bob Gore and patented quickly thereafter) is a polymer known as polytetrafluoroethylene that resulted in a microporous structure that repelled water, but was nevertheless breathable. At what point in that sentence did your mind begin wandering? Do you see how hard it is to market a performance fabric? Gore Tex found its audience through outdoor brands in the late 1970s. The logo on gloves, pants, and jackets serves as both a proprietary badge and an invitation for partners—North Face, Patagonia, Arc’teryx, etc— to mark up the price from 20 to 50%. They’re clever in the way they’ve leaned into others to spread the word, using the superior social reach Salomon, Timberland, and others to stay top of mind. Even today, one of their IG handles is dedicated simply to surfacing storytelling that partners have created for them. The other is a more eclectic mix of product explanation, care, and athlete testimonials. Those posts, and the how-to-care videos on their YouTube channel do well. Taking a stab at storytelling, the brand launched a modest series on the fellowship of outdoor activity that reminds of similar efforts by Hoka, Yeti, or Patagonia. That series …. didn’t do as well. In an era where every brand is thinking about how to reach our headspace through “entertainment” (everyone wants a Barbie, few are willing to extend the budget and the trust to make one), ingredient brands might not have to be among them. Rather than mimic what their partner brands do better, Gore-Tex might ask itself in what new, unpredictable ways they can show up, or stay top of mind to their next generation of customers. Unlike Intel, it has an easier time showing (not telling) their differentiation. And this opens them up to a playground of TikTok and IG “creators” to have fun with their products: pushing them to their limits in ridiculous, creative ways. Might they score their very own Stanley cup moment?
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser