There have been previous reports about Qualcomm wanting to be a well known brand-name and it is in the news again for further endeavours in marketing and advertising, aimed at building the brand. Reuters reports that the Santa Clara, California based chipmaker is stepping up its campaign to “build customer loyalty” for its processors in the highly competitive smartphone industry.
As part of its fresh marketing and branding thrust Qualcomm has prepared a new TV commercial. This will initially be played in US cinemas and will be rolled out further afield to places including China. Qualcomm will also pay for advertising slots on US national TV networks in the “next couple of months”.
Chief Marketing Officer Anand Chandrasekher showed the new commercial to analysts and explained “We're trying to build an emotional bond with our customers”. Currently Qualcomm is enjoying strong demand for its processors bolstered by its first mover advantage into LTE capable SoCs. However company forecasts aren’t so rosy as other chipmakers are certain to catch up soon and in general consumers have little knowledge or loyalty to any particular ARM SoC producer.
“Qualcomm Inside”?
Are we going to see a plethora of little stickers on Android handsets and tablets in the future boasting things such as “Snapdragon Powered”, “Adreno Accelerated” and “Memory Cube 3D RAM”? Reuters reports that industry experts say “As a rule, it's seen as a good idea to add extra branding to products like smartphones only when the additional brand strongly conveys a quality that the handset maker's own brand lacks.” That could often be the case in the almost commodity-like Android device market. On this subject Qualcomm’s Chandrasekher said “It's not our intention to compete with our customers' or partners' brands. ... Our brand should be accretive to big brands, not dilutive.”
Are these kinds of stickers coming to Android handsets?
Snapdragon 800 to enter mass production this month
In related news Engadget reported, at the end of last week, that the Snapdragon 600 will be joined by its big brother the Snapdragon 800 by the end of this month. The 28nm Snapdragon 800 can maintain a clock speed of up to 2.3GHz and the four cores can use asynchronous clocks to preserve energy. Also the Snapdragon 800 features an Adreno 330 graphics processor which is capable of 4K playback at 30fps as well as better 3D rendering performance. Qualcomm wouldn’t comment on any upcoming devices featuring its new, powerful Snapdragon 800.
