I was looking through the most recent Best Buy sales flier and looked at the page on desktop computers. And was struck by the multiple layers of branding. Stripping off the computer manufacturer layer (emachines, Dell, HP, and Gateway) and looking at just the central processors listed show the following choices:

AMD Athlon 64 4000+, Intel Pentium Dual-Core, AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core 6000+, AMD Phenom Quad-Core 9600, and an Intel Core 2 Quad Processor.

So, what sense is an intrepid desktop computer purchaser likely to make of their possible choices? Mostly, without significant research, the consumer will look for things like 2-cores are better than one and four must be really good and then look at their price budget. But will they get value?

Where is the clarity and simplicity?

Think about the entire sales Chanel. Everyone in that system must figure out what this all means to communicate to others in the chanel. Or everyone uses price points as the only indicator of performance – though that is often clouded by how much ram or what storage capacities and monitors are included in the computer system purchase.

With a clouded picture created from multiple mostly meaningless brand images, a consumer is left to just pick any machine that fits their budget.

As a manufacturer in any business that’s the worst possible criteria.

A manufacturer wants lust. They want a customer to feel they need ten cylinders instead of eight and want a Viper instead of a Corvette and pony up a $20,000 premium.

A few years ago, there was a fierce performance push in CPU chips centered around chip clock cycles. It was much better to purchase a 500Mhz chip than a 300Mhz one. It was easy to see the measured difference. It was hard for the manufacturers to keep on the Moore’s Law treadmill, and when they fell off their only choice seemed to be multiple cores. And marketing brand gimmickry.

Confuse the buyer. Is that Quad-Core slower or faster than the Dual-Core processor? And what’s a Phenom? Or how do the other names bantered about over the years; Celeron, Sempron, Duron, Xenon, and such fit amongst all of this? It’s not clear – which is a risk – a risk that the consumer may even begin to think their existing home computer is quite satisfactory, it has some sort of Core in it, and checks the email ok, so they’ll wait for next week’s flier to see if there is more sense in the paper.

So, is your company wallowing in brands? Figure out how the customer shops and makes decisions. Make the process simple and meaningful. You will likely find that by simplifying your message, you will streamline your products, lean out your inventory, better focus your marketing expenditures, and thus strengthen your core marketing message – which will translate into increased sales.

Cheers!