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Branding Gone Wrong: Industry Standards

by: jillian@280group.com on Date: Thu, 24 Jun 2010 Time: 3:13 PM

The wonderful thing about industry standards is that they give companies an easy way to add value to their products and they give the consumer a stamp of approval that all is well and that products will work together. A few examples include Wi Fi, USB, Firewire, and Ethernet. The downside of industry standards is that they quickly become checklist items on a feature list - everyone includes them and this allows for no differentiation.

A few companies try to get around this by attempting to brand industry standard features. I recently had two experiences with new products that pointed out why doing this can work horribly against a company. Both were with major brands, Apple and Sony, and both are a good example of how a company can become disillusioned into thinking that their power and influence in the industry is beyond what will matter to their customers.

The first experience was with Apple. I recently built a digital recording studio using Pro Tools from Digidesign and a dual processor G4 Macintosh. Years ago I was the Product Manager for the Finder and Human Interface at Apple, and in the digital recording world it is well-known that Macs are the best platform for working with audio (less hassles, better software, etc.), so I thought that going with a Mac was the right thing to do.

I'm not a Mac guy anymore - I switched to Windows back in the mid 90's, so I had to do a lot of footwork up front to determine which model to buy and what features I wanted. Part of my requirements were that I needed to be able to use the machine with my home Wi Fi (802.11b) network.

Now Apple a few years ago decided to brand Wi Fi and call it Airport. This would provide wonderful differentiation for them, and the loyal Apple masses certainly liked it. (At least four or five times I had Apple fans tell me that Airport was easy and great).

But here's the problem. For the rest of the world outside of Apple's customer base branding Airport creates uncertainty, doubt and an obstacle in the buying process.

I wanted to make sure that Airport was compatible with my industry standard Wi Fi router, so I started asking people about it. I asked all of the Apple fans I knew, and none of them had any idea what Wi Fi was. I asked the techies I knew, and they said "there is a good chance it will work, but I'm not sure." I went to the Apple website and searched for 802.11b and Wi Fi and found nothing. Then I went into an Apple store and asked a salesperson - he had never heard of Wi Fi and had no idea what I was talking about.

In this case Airport worked against Apple in a big way.

The second example has to do with Sony. My wife and I bought a new digital camcorder from Sony. It has been a great product and far exceeded our expectations. So much so that I decided to try doing some digital video editing. After all, I had just bought the G4 Mac for my music studio and it is supposed to be THE premier machine for editing video.

I tried to determine if the video camera (which is a fairly new model) would work with the Mac. No mention of it anywhere. I had read the Sony manual and it talked about connecting to a computer, either using USB or in some cases using a computer that supported Sony's ilink fast transfer technology. I tried USB. No luck. I knew the Mac had industry standard Firewire built in, but there was no mention of firewire anywhere in the Sony documentation or Sony's website. I finally gave up.

As it turns out, I mentioned this to a tech-savvy friend of mine. He had gone through the same thing. He enlightened me that ilink is FireWire (had I known to look for the mentions of IEEE 1394 standard compatibility all would have been fine). I hooked up the camera and got it to work within minutes.

I'll take the blame for not knowing Firewire was also referred to as IEEE1394. But if I don't' know that, and I work in the tech industry, imagine how confused the rest of the world out there is about whether Sony's ilink products are compatible.
How much money, time and effort did Apple spend branding Airport and Sony spend branding ilink? I don't know. I'm sure it seemed like a smart idea to their marketing people at the time.
Was this Marketing Brilliance, or not?

About the Author

Brian Lawley is the CEO and founder of the 280 Group (www.280group.com), and has shipped more than fifty successful products. He is the former President of the Silicon Valley Product Management Association, won the 2008 AIPMM award for Excellence in Thought Leadership for Product Management and is the author of the best-selling books, Expert Product Management and The Phenomenal Product Manager.

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