Roger’s $0.02 - Word Salad Branding (Patreon)

One of the great sins in marketing is confusing or unclear branding. If I say “I just bought a Mustang or I just ordered a Happy Meal” most adults in the English-speaking world would automatically know I’m talking about a sports car from Ford and a food order from McDonalds. On the opaque side of branding are tech companies who LOVE using an esoteric combination of words, names by a committee, and cryptic alphanumeric syntax that produce their word salad brands. This was very apparent during a number of product announcements this CES. While there were the usual suspects from CE companies like Samsung, LG, and Sony the most egregious were Intel, AMD, and to a far lesser extent Nvidia.

AMD and Intel are notorious for using confusing naming conventions for their multiple generations of CPUs, GPUs, chipsets, and code names from differing architectures. But this year’s was bad. Between Intel’s generation name, model segment, and part number it adds up to a confusing mess. Do you want the 13th or 14th-generation Intel processor? They’re both based on Raptor Lake. Or is that Comet Lake or Meteor Lake? Oh, you want a Core i7-14700. Do you want to K or F version of that? And just to add to the confusion there’s Core and Core Ultra. Core Ultra is based on the newer Meteor Lake so those will be called Core 7 or Core 5 not Core i7 or Core i5 like the older chips. All the other stuff will stick with Core. Everyone I’ve met who covers the chip industry has a cheat sheet or two to keep everything straight. Even Intel PR I’ve talked to in the past have had to dig through their notes to make sure they understood everything.

AMD is no better. Zen 3, Zen 4, and the upcoming Zen 5 architecture. That I can grok. It’s when you have chips like Ryzen 9, 7, and 5 that point to the model segment. But then that’s followed with a 5000, 7000, or 8000. You can have a Ryzen 7 8700G, a Ryzen 5 8600G, a Ryzen 5 8500G, and a Ryzen 3 8300G. But you can also have a Ryzen 7 5700, Ryzen 5 5600GT, and Ryzen 5 5500GT. And that’s before you add in AMD’s video card lineup. It’s enough to make you want to scream. Hard to decipher, hard to remember, and hard to say without mixing up the order of the numbers.

There’s a point where product categories get way too complicated and confusing. People could throw up in their hands in confusion and say I’ll go with something else. Apple’s genius is in making things quite simple to understand in comparison. Sure there’s a range of chips in their Mac line but there are relatively few and easy to understand. There’s the generation, M1, M2, or M3 SoC. Then there’s the plain vanilla version, the Pro version, and for people with money to spend the Max version. Relatively straightforward. Same with the actual Mac line itself. There’s the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac Mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro. That’s it. There’s enough variety to cobble together something useful but with the understanding of its place in the performance/price hierarchy of the Apple store. Hopefully, companies will understand that product confusion can lead to customer frustration and eventually disinterest.