Do you market to your buyers, or your users?

Tim Bray wrote a piece questioning why Intel feels it needs to market its wares at a simple level that avoids going into details of bits and bytes. His argument was that Intel's customers are Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, etc., and that these folks do care about the bits and bytes.

However, I think this misses the difference between buyers and users. Intel's immediate customers care about bits and bytes, for sure. However, what worries a lot of companies these days is the risk of disintermediation, a loss of a direct connection with the end user. If you lose that link, then your product can be replaced easily by another (perhaps cheaper) product, without the end user knowing or caring. Nobody wants to be selling a commodity product if they can avoid it, nobody wants to be selling just on price. They want a real brand, something that end users specifically ask for, insist on, and won't part with their money unless they get.

Hence all of the "Intel Inside" advertising, and the new slogan "Leap ahead" (not that it grabs me personally). Intel wants people shopping for a computer to insist on Intel. Perhaps more importantly, they want CEOs and CIOs and CTOs to put "Intel" into their corporate RFPs that Apple, Dell, HP, IBM, etc. will potentially bid for. It's a very big deal, if you can get it right. Whether Intel have it right is something we'll have to judge over the next few years; AMD gave a very strong performance in 2005, so the future will be interesting.

Note: I don't give investment advice. This is just a personal comment, and should not be interpreted as investment advice.