Processor brands confuse consumers

Research firm In-Stat conducted a survey about semiconductor branding and found that current strategies are faltering. The report indicates that while a semiconductor product brand may be identified, it is often not associated with the company that manufactures the product. Even more often, early adopters incorrectly identified the platform for which the product was developed, the high-tech market research firm says. The survey included a sampling of newer brands from AMD, ATI (now part of AMD, which was figured into the results), IBM, Intel, NVIDIA, and VIA.

“Recent moves away from the Pentium brand, coupled with attacks on the Celeron brand by AMD, have weakened Intel’s once near dominance in this area,” says Ian Lao, In-Stat analyst. “In-Stat has long contended that evolving purchasing patterns resulting from changing usage patterns of computing solutions will likely weaken processor brands. The new alphanumeric numbering schemes implemented by several processor vendors appear to have accelerated this trend.”

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

Product brands are associated with the wrong manufacturer 17%–50% of the time, on average.

Graphics processor brands GeForce and Radeon had greater than 40% recognition rates.

Similarities in product brand names like Fusion and CoreFusion are confusing to customers.