Brands and the kiss of commodities
Grant McCracken detects an apparent brand shortfall at HP, one that threatens to push the PC maker one step closer to the commodity basement. His assessment makes a lot of sense to me.
Grant cites a new HP ad campaign that promotes HP’s PC’s in the context of some mighty metaphors:
Your personal computer is your backup brain. It’s your life and the life of your business. It’s your astonishing strategy, staggering proposal, dazzling calculation. It’s your autobiography, written in thousands of daily words.
He logically looks for new functions or features in the HP product that would deliver on this buoyant context. Alas, he 
finds only a leaden “Total Care” package. His response: “That’s it? What happened to ‘Your personal computer is your backup brain…your astonishing strategy, staggering proposal, dazzling calculation, your autobiography’? Until this brand promise is built into the HP PC, the ad is really just talk.”
Yep, the campaign is mostly fluff stuff. When box gets to buyer, HP PC’s really aren’t that different after all.
Where’s the brand?
And what about the HP brand in all this?
It should be front and center, building value and creating customers. But it’s nowhere to be seen, perhaps having been shunted off to a corner cell in a junior accountant’s spreadsheet.
I would argue that HP is confronting the same brand crisis that plagues almost all PC makers. There are too many commodity inputs, and too few value outputs.
Commodity thinking yields commodity products
The crisis has its origin in the commodity provenance of the PC itself. These days PC makers source their products from 
sub-tier manufacturers as virtual commodities. They use standard or off-the-shelf components, outsource as much production as possible, ruthlessly shave costs, and pit vendor against vendor in cutthroat competition. Once products are ready, PC makers then need to sell these commodity-induced units (that they pay for) as value-induced glories (that you and I pay for.)
Brand kiss—or commodity kiss?
This is where brands come in—or should come in. Brands are value engines, with protean powers. (Any practice with Dionysus as its patron saint is a force to be reckoned with.) It’s up to the brand to translate the blood, sweat and gears of the commoditized production process into a bountiful brand kiss when the buyer opens the box. That’s the customer payoff.
To be kissed by a commodity is not very tasty. It’s, well, like this.
Grant hits the nail on the head when he states that HP’s brand challenge is to “Identify a higher value that [the] consumer cares about, and deliver this value with product and brand development.” Unfortunately, HP still clings to the traditional brand model—the one of top-down “branding” and ad campaigns—and that model is broken.
Needed: a focus on creating customers
It would help HP if they had a more concrete idea of the customer they were trying to create. (That’s the customer that will carry their business forward.) This is where their brand would jump into action with platforms, programs and applications to lead these customers to richer lives—through the product. (HP’s photo-related businesses certainly grasp this point.) The disconnect between the HP PC ad and what the HP product delivers—with the HP brand MIA—tells customers that HP hasn’t totally sorted things out yet.
Photo sources:
hp insignia: ehecatzin, Flickr;
keyboard: PartsnPieces, Flickr
commodity kiss: Dave-F, Flickr
