
Eee - a case study in bad marketing - swombat
http://www.ericsink.com/entries/eee.html
======
Chocobean
So, Mr Sink says that there are "so many products under the Eee name that soon
the brand will be meaningless." He had one reason, but he didn't bother
telling us why that may be true.

His only reason was this : there are so many offerings of Eee, the _product
version_ or _model_ is unclear and non-specific. As a result, he claims, the
brand will become meaningless and die. It is true that "I have an Eee" is as
vague as "I have a game console" or, closer to home: "I have a laptop". But
meaningless and dying? Historical evidence suggests otherwise.

The phrase "I have a DS" doesn't tell you if I have an ugly grey brick-shaped
plastic or a beautiful, smooth and colourful piece of art; but it tells you I
have a gaming console, speficially, one not made by Sony.

The iPod comes in nearly as many different offerings: iPod Classic, iPod
Touch, iPod Nano, iPod Shuffle, multiplied by many different version numbers.
But I think we can all agree that iPod as a brand is not going to go anywhere,
and is certainly not meaningless in the marketing world.

Perhaps Asus isn't trying to make Eee stand out as a single product, but
rather an entire _product series_ , or perhaps even an entire category all on
its own. It is not a "Laptop model number Eee 701 made by company x", but "an
Eee". This is the true power of branding, when your brand is so successful
that the average person refers to your product not by what it is, but by its
very name.

If I tell you I drive a Porche, I am not being specific about what kind of car
I'm driving, but to some people, what I have suggested matters more than if
it's red or an SUV or brand new.

~~~
prospero
But an iPod or Porsche are used for very specific things (listening to music
and going fast, respectively). His point was that the original Eee was useful
in a way normal laptops or PCs are not. To apply the same name to more
conventional devices dilutes the brand power of the original Eee, much like if
Porsche made a pickup truck.

~~~
eru
<http://images.google.de/images?q=Porsche%20Cayenne%20PickUp>

~~~
Chocobean
Thanks Eru. Exactly. They also make really really ugly SUVs.

To other repliers to my original comment, I picked Porsche and iPod because
both brands make one (1) type of thing in many (*) different styles and
flavours. The Eee is a portable computer (laptop), albeit in many different
flavours, just like how all Porsches are automobiles and all iPods are MP3
players.

Some are bigger in capacity, some are faster, some are more heavy duty, some
are more compact and beautiful in form. All of the brands aim to be an
indicator for stylish lifestyle. I am arguing that having a wide range of
options under one brand umbrella has worked fabulously in the past for other
brands. Also that it does not necessarily dilute the definition of the
product, but rather by giving the brand a range of options, completes it and
let it become a category all on its own.

~~~
prospero
Porsche has made little except high-performance sports cars for more than
fifty years (certainly that's where they've focused their branding). Apple
gained huge market share before making an iPod that did anything other than
play music.

Asus waited about four months before sticking the "Eee" brand on every product
in sight. There's a difference.

~~~
eru
Oh, and very important for those Americans: PORSH-uh (IPA: /ˈpɔrʃə/).

------
swilliams
Agreed completely. I found the original Eee (and I don't even know the numeric
model to go with it) to be a great idea. Nowadays I don't even have a clear
mental image for what it is, a low-end cheap laptop? A desktop? What?

Too bad really, Asus had a good thing going.

------
smanek
_"After all, they're basically a manufacturing company, not a marketing
company, right? The fact that they created a great brand was probably an
accident anyway.

But as a marketer, that's what makes this even more infuriating. Creating a
great brand usually requires hard work, lots of creativity, and tremendous
discipline. When someone pursues the goal in that manner and succeeds, I
admire them. But when someone accidentally succeeds, and then destroys their
own work, I just want to bang my head against the desk."_

Asus created a great brand by building consistently great products - not by
marketing or gimmicks. To this day, I refuse to buy any montherboard other
than an Asus. I've had Soyos, MSIs, and many other spontaneously fail on me,
but never an Asus.

That's the right way to build a brand name.

~~~
jimbokun
Different brand.

The Eee brand meant something else, and could have become the label for an
entire product category. As "iPod" replaced "MP3 player", "Eee" had the
potential to replace "real computer small enough to take anywhere without
thinking about it too much."

This is the brand whose demise Eric Sink laments.

~~~
nailer
Exactly. These devices have gone from being 'eeePC clones' to 'Netbooks'

------
menloparkbum
Aren't sales a better metric for determining marketing effectiveness? (vs.
Eric Sink's personal opinion)

The EEE is targeted mainly to consumers in Taiwan and the rest of Asia, where
it has consistently sold out since it was introduced. It even sells out at the
Taiwanese computer store in SF where I buy my ethernet cables.

~~~
mtts
In France they give the thing away with mobile phone subscriptions. What they
do is build dazzling displays for it in mobile phone stores, positioning it as
the lastest in cool gadgetry. And I must admit it really looks slick, in a "I
didn't know there was a new iPod that's kind of like a notebook computer" kind
of way, which I guess is exactly what they're aiming for.

------
ojbyrne
One of the more interesting things they're doing is that a bank up here in
Canada is giving them away when you open a specific type of account:
[http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/products/deposits/nolimit/index....](http://www.rbcroyalbank.com/products/deposits/nolimit/index.html)

and they heavily advertise it on radio, tv and billboards.

It almost evokes the word "toaster" a la bank promotions from the 50s (or at
least old tv shows). If what you're trying to do is sell, not a computer, but
an "internet appliance" to a mass audience, it seems pretty smart.

------
13ren
In the bigger picture, ASUS need to fill in _all_ the gaps between the low-end
eee and a laptop proper, so they don't open an opportunity for a competitor.

Their brand "eee" is their best way to signal to consumers that they have a
smaller-than-laptop available and why don't you have look, let's see I bet
this one is just right for you, ok? a bit bigger? a bit smaller?

Incidentally, they already have dropped the "eee" brand from the high-end
"eee" style machines.

Also, I hope I fail as well as them. :-)

------
iigs
My opinion comes down 180 degrees from the article Author.

The full name of the brand is "Eee PC", not just "Eee" - a mistake the article
author makes. It's clumsy and inelegant, too long, nobody says the whole
thing, and if you say it aloud it sounds the same as "EPC" which isn't good
for literal word of mouth -- no google result for EPC sends you the right way.

ASUS isn't even pronounced the intuitive way (for English speakers):
[http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/eee-pc/how-to-pronounce-eee-
pc-32...](http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/eee-pc/how-to-pronounce-eee-
pc-320007.php) \-- it's evidently pronounced ah-SOOs, not AY-suhs. Branding
faux-pas (fox-pass, if you please).

Asus is fighting an uphill battle here. Not only does nobody know what an Eee
PC is, they don't know what an Asus is. I have been geeking since I was a
toddler and I know Asus makes motherboards, but even I don't know if they're
any good. They sound too much like Acer, a company that does make PCs, but not
the one you care about in this case. In fact, in my free association exercise
I think Asus -> Acer -> monitor for my friend's Packard Bell 486 a long time
ago. Uphill battle indeed.

In fact, I didn't even know Asus made ready to buy computers, until I visited
their site and recognized one that a coworker owns and is quite proud of.

Furthermore, if you search for Asus on google, the first hit is for "ASUS
International" and the second hit is for "ASUSTek Computer Inc.". Even _they_
don't know what their brand is.

These are great gadgets but their branding is screwed, stem to stern. They've
pretty much rendered themselves ineligible to be a premium / high margin
provider in this field. The consolation prize is they know how to play the
cut-throat margins game, so they can at least work that angle.

If I was running the show I'd rename Eee to something that prounounced easily
and spelled like it sounded, and then anchor that as the brand name. Move the
current products under that name, so the "Asus Eee PC Surf" would become a
"WhateverBrand Surf". After building that brand up move the entire Asus
prebuilt laptop line under a sub-brand of the new company name. As now,
position as a company that makes easy to use computers, differentiate by using
customized and streamlined Linux. Sell the main product with a clear slogan
(think "Just big enough" without the obvious phallic misinterpretation), and
maybe they'd have a consumer brand that they could build from.

~~~
eru
They pronounce ASUS sane - if you happen to know Latin, Turkish, German etc.

