Intel’s sticker marketing

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Hey folks - Tom Alder here 👋 I write Strategy Breakdowns, a 3-minute weekly email on the strategy playbooks and growth hacks that built the world's greatest companies, read by 150k strategy nerds. You can also find me on LinkedIn and X for daily tech content.

Today’s piece is a natural SB x BC crossover. One of those dead-simple branding playbooks that quietly built one of the largest tech companies in history.

Enjoy ✌️

I’d bet 33.3 million Sonnet input tokens that the reason you’ve heard the name Intel is because you had a chunky tower / laptop brick with one of these stickers on it.

The little swirl that lived on essentially every single PC for two decades.
I assumed it was the output of some carefully constructed 5-year brand plan.

It wasn't.

It was the outcome of Intel losing a court case nobody remembers.
And it accidentally became the most effective sticker-marketing campaign of all time.

Here’s how it went down.

In March 1991, a federal judge in San Jose told Intel they couldn't trademark the number "386."

It was generic, so AMD (2nd largest US chip manufacturer) could use it, and create their own chips named “386”.

The entire naming convention Intel had built its brand on (286, 386, 486) was suddenly un-protectable.

CEO Andy Grove gave his VP of Corporate Marketing, Dennis Carter, the weekend "to figure what [we] would do about it."

Carter realised the court had handed Intel a deeper problem than a lost trademark. As long as Original Equipment Manufacturers (“OEMs”, i.e. PC-makers) were the customer, AMD's cheaper "386" would always win.

The fix was to create demand at the end consumer, the person at Best Buy who'd never thought about b2b chip manufacturers in their life.

If they learned to ask for Intel by name, OEMs couldn't switch to AMD without losing the sale.

They came up with a strategy to win consumer mindshare by paying every PC maker on earth to advertise Intel for them.

Here's the playbook.

→ Intel set aside 3% of its microprocessor revenue and poured it into a co-op marketing fund.
→ Any PC maker who wanted to dip into it could get up to 50% of their print and TV ad spend reimbursed by Intel.

→ The only conditions:

12 months later 300 Original Equipment Manufacturers (’OEMs’) signed up. Another 12 months later, 500.

That year, 70% of all eligible PC ads were featuring intel’s logo, and their sales jumped 63%.

European awareness of the Intel brand climbed from 24% in 1991 to 94% (!) by 1995.

AdAge called it: "the most effective co-op advertising program in history... a stellar run in which the chip giant built a brand, influenced a generation of PC users."

Nobody had ever ingredient-branded a microprocessor before 1991.

Intel borrowed the idea from Dolby (on your stereo), Nutrasweet (in your Diet Coke), and Lycra (in your gym fit).

The pattern across each of these: a B2B supplier that pays the end-product brand to display it.

Intel’s version came with one extra ingredient. The sticker.

The TV ads Intel funded were only paid for once → The sticker drove continuous brand marketing for the lifetime of the devices they shipped on.

Every Dell, every Gateway, every Hewlett-Packard became a physical billboard the buyer carried home, sat on their desk, and looked at daily for the next 5 years.

Ongoing media placements, paid for once.

The 3% of revenue Intel spent on the co-op fund bought millions of square inches of permanent ad space inside the most valuable real estate on earth: the customer's home.

Not a temporary Google Search Engine Results Page ad that only displays against specific search terms, before users click away.

Not an Instagram ad that gets scrolled past in 0.15 seconds.

A physical sticker, within eye-shot, for 100% of the time the end-user is online.

To compound the success of the sticker campaign, in 1994, Carter commissioned an Austrian composer named Walter Werzowa to write a sonic logo.

Five notes.

D♭, D♭, G♭, D♭, A♭. The rhythm was lifted directly from the syllables: "In-tel In-side."

Still pure heat 🔥

The result was one of the most iconic jingles of all time.

In their focus group studies, 80% recognised the melody when played on a violin but 100% recognised it the moment it was played with Intel's actual sound.

Including when researchers deliberately added a wrong note.

By the late 90s the Bong was playing somewhere on earth roughly every 5 minutes.

For the marketers reading this: Your visual brand competes with 1000s of logos a person sees per day.

But an audio brand competes with the small handful of jingles a person hears that week.

The acoustic environment is far more emotionally direct, and far less crowded than the visual.

(Quietly humming for a Strategy Breakdowns jingle that pops 🎵)

Compaq and IBM both hated Intel Inside.

The campaign told consumers that every PC running a given Intel chip was fundamentally the same. The premium machine, the budget machine, the gaming rig. All of them. Intel inside.

By centralising brand value at the chip layer, Intel deliberately commoditised the layer above it.

The PC OEM became a swappable assembler of someone else's components.

And once buyers started shopping by what was inside the box rather than whose name was on it, the OEMs lost their pricing power.

Intel was even running Super Bowl ads, just to advertise their chips.

Over the next few years, Compaq and IBM (the 2 largest PC manufacturers) exited the PC business.

The chip had become more famous than the computer it lived in.

Every value chain has one layer that owns the customer's mindshare.

Most components stay anonymous because the assembled product gets all the attention.

Intel spent 3% of revenue making sure they became the layer the buyer remembers.

Intel’s sticker was the cheapest line item in the whole campaign, and it kept selling chips long after the ads it was connected to had stopped running.

So work out which layer of your own business owns the customer’s mind. Ask a customer what they just bought and listen for which name comes out of their mouth first.

Might be the ingredient. Might be the shop. Might be the person whose name is on the door.

If it’s you, fight to hold it. If it isn’t, whoever does hold it is working hard right now to keep things exactly as they are.

That’s me done. I write Strategy Breakdowns every week, looking at the strategy playbooks and growth hacks that built the world's greatest companies. You can also find me on LinkedIn and X.

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