Intel fabs a customer
Interesting article in Ars Technica on how Intel employs ethnographers, anthropologists and other social scientists to help it define reference sets of customers for its new System on a Chip (SOC) designs. This is a smart move by Intel to position itself in the customer creation process. Intel fabs a customer context with each SOC design. (SOC’s are the heart of handhelds and similar digital devices and will drive the future of portable computing.)
(I say “fabs a customer” because Intel is famed as the world’s greatest fabricator of microchips.)
Creating a customer—by proxy
Intel doesn’t make consumer goods, and it doesn’t sell its chips to you and me. It sells them to manufacturers who put them in their products. So how does Intel make sure that its SOC’s will meet the needs of real consumer markets—or help create those markets?
From the Ars Technica article:
The ethnographers essentially stand in for OEM devicemakers, in that they provide Intel with market-oriented input into the kinds of products that the company should be designing SOC’s for. In other words, the user experience researchers can function as substitute “customers,” so that Intel can iterate its products internally in conversation with a kind of “market.”
The end result . . . is a set of “reference experiences”—basically complete, market-ready products with everything up to and including the interface already designed by Intel and run internally through a product development process that includes ethnographers. These products are then labeled as “reference designs” and offered to what are essentially resellers, who can either take the whole thing, re-badge it, and go to market, or replace parts of it with some of their own engineering.
To me, this is creating a customer by proxy, an enlightened marketing initiative. The result is that Intel’s SOC’s are really more than “systems on a chip.” They’re markets on a chip. Or, when fine tuned, they’re potentially customers on a chip.
Is Intel destined to be an ingredient brand?
Is a powerhouse like Intel forever destined to be an ingredient brand, buried in someone else’s products, etched in cold silicon and never feeling the hot product passion from customer hands? I don’t think so. You’re an ingredient brand by choice. By using design ethnography Intel has migrated from being an ingredient in a device to being an ingredient in a customer context. That’s a monumental step upward. It points toward a growing capability to develop a full (passionate) consumer brand downstream—if that’s what Intel should want.
