Tipping the cow: Gateway rebranding
Gateway Computer is going through a rebranding, and in the process is ditching its trademark folksy cow theme in favor of a sleek, modern treatment.
Gateway’s is a very high-stakes version of the dilemma that many companies currently face: how to go about branding yourself in a new and unusual way that gets you noticed, yet retain the “gravitas” to sell product to potential customer sectors that your market research has pegged as “conservative”:
Because of the home-PC slowdown, Gateway is courting more business and government clients. Company brass believe the longtime cow motif may be too cartoonish for pitching to more sober commercial clients.
Gateway succeeded during the ’90s tech boom, but with their fortunes tied to the PC, their revenue has taken a beating in the last two years of The Great Contraction. So it seems logical that now is a good time to rebrand, to lose the bovine baggage in favor of a new, sleek, hi-tech look.
The problem Gateway faces is that the cow branding is the one thing that most distinguished them from all the other PC clones with identical products and marketing. Like it or not,
“The cow motif was one of those odd, quirky, counterintuitive trademarks that succeeded in spite of itself,” said Bob Garfield, a columnist for Advertising Age. “Because high-tech and folksy had never before been joined into one concept, it imbued the brand with the trustworthiness of good, wholesome folks in flyover country providing value and honest, American hard work.
“It is simply hard for me to imagine that they’re running away from it,” Garfield said. “The company built up so much equity in its trademark and trade dress that abandoning it at any point is dangerous, bordering on reckless, behavior. It’s like UPS painting its trucks orange.”
And indeed, UPS has even made its brown color the focus of its recent branding efforts.
During economic boom times, companies are more concerned with differentiating themselves from the competition, and they have the resources to pursue strategies to that end. During a prolonged economic slump like the current one, however, when revenues for many companies, especially tech companies, have fallen hard, even the slightest possibility that one’s very difference from the rest of the pack could be adversely affecting the bottom line becomes a nagging pain. Ultimately, many companies go the Gateway route, and throw in the towel on what made them different in the hopes of cashing in on what they think they’re missing out on.
With the cow motif, Gateway was essentially trying to be more like Apple than the other PC makers, by emphasizing humanistic values over cold engineering specs. In theory it should have worked: Apple’s branding genius without the minority platform/OS baggage. The problem is that it just never rose to that level, never created a personality that was bigger and more provocative than computers.
It’s a problem with no easy solutions. The new Gateway effort might just work, especially in conjunction with a suite of new electronics products that diversify the company away from being just a PC manufacturer. Or they could blend in so well with the competition that they disappear entirely.
No Comments so far:
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
