The Power Of Ingredient Branding

In the first article in this series, I defined what ingredient branding is, covering its benefits as well as the importance of being the first in a product segment to implement it. I shared the case studies of Intel and Dolby to illustrate this. Two more very interesting case studies, that of NVIDIA and Zeiss, endorse the power of ingredient branding further.

- Abhimanyu Mathur

In case you have not read the first article, let me recap the most important aspect of it, which is a simple explanation of what an ingredient brand is – it’s when a component manufacturer builds a brand with the end user as the target audience, and not the ingredient brand’s customer. A quick example to explain this is to look at how Intel built a brand with end users (PC buyers) in mind and did not rely on its reputation with its direct customers like HP, Compaq and IBM. As a result, the end users became aware of the capabilities of the brand and desired to have it in their PCs; thus, creating a ‘pull’ for the brand. This resulted in the PC manufacturer being able to charge a premium for using Intel as a processor, which was beneficial to both companies.

This second article explores two more cases of component companies that have built a brand. The first is the amazing story of how NVIDIA got to where it is today, and why it is poised to dominate the market in the future.

The second is an older story of Zeiss, with a legacy in lenses that made it the perfect choice to be an ingredient brand in camera phones.

NVIDIA and the GPU

The beginnings: NVIDIA is synonymous with gaming, and for good reason. It was established in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. This happened just three years after Intel launched its super successful ‘Intel Inside’ campaign. So NVIDIA’s journey has been very different. It seems ‘slow’ only in comparison to Intel, which is an exception. But NVIDIA has grown from being a niche brand to now being more mainstream.