IBM Rebrands its PC's

November 1994

IBM has managed for some time to completely confuse the market by offering a bewildering array of products and options, under too many confusing and overlapping brand names. On October 17, IBM moved to change that, by finishing the change in brand names it started when it replaced its PS/1 consumer product line earlier this year with its new Aptiva. In doing this, IBM is moving from nine to four brands, from 190 to fewer than 65 models and to a new and increased flexibility in design and manufacturing which permits it to offer volume customers -- dealers, systems integrators, or large customers -- any configuration, any memory size, or any application preload.

IBM now has four main PC product brands:

The idea is that customers will be pointed to the right product, in the right channel, but all the IBM brand will be marketed under a single $100 million campaign (for the next four months) that emphasizes:

• Reliability, leveraging the IBM reputation at the PC level of the market.

• Affordability, (IBM means aggressive competitive prices within the appropriate channel -- they’ll compete with Compaq, but don’t expect them to compete with Dell.)

• Best Support and Service, including their ability to make "home calls" via modem. (This is the best thing they do. We’ve tried this on our ThinkPad 750 and we loved it. They down loaded a missing driver and made an adjustment to our config.sys file. It was great.)

• Leading technology, This means getting IBM’s lab efforts into commercial products as soon as practical.

IBM believes if it can simplify the entire PC experience it can expand both the market and IBM’s share of that market and they are probably right. The question is whether this branding strategy will do the trick.

Comments or Questions: Send Email to opinions@wohl.com

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Entire contents © 1994 by Amy D. Wohl. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this publication in any form without prior written permission is forbidden.