Seagate and Maxtor's New Images
Let's face it: In the world of technology, there's no direct correlation between a product's usefulness and its interestingness. Hard drives are about as essential as PC hardware gets, yet they're...kind of boring. In many ways, that's a virtue--you want a drive to do what it's supposed to do, and do it without you having to give it much thought. But it might be a bit of an issue if you're a gigantic hard-drive company whose goal is to get potential customers excited about your products.
Enter the new brand identity and marketing direction unveiled by drive king Seagate at CES in Las Vegas today. It couldn't be much more different from the plain, dispassionate, just-the-facts feel of the company's long-time corporate personality, which wasn't a great leap beyond the plain cardboard boxes that hard drives used to come in.
Seagate is now marketing all its packaged consumer storage devices under a new product-line name, FreeAgent (no relation to PCW's Free Agent, Matthew Newton). Rather than using prosaic-but-descriptive terms like "external hard drive," the company's packaging talks about "data movers." The packaging also features mysterious phrases drawn from Seagate focus groups about drives and the things people store on them (such as "That's not my old girlfriend,") and one box that I saw during a visit with the company today referred to a drive's capacity as "750 glorious gigabytes."
The products themselves have undergone complete industrial-design makeovers, courtesy of the famous stylists of FrogDesign. I was about to say that they're the handsomest drives I've ever seen, but it's more accurate to say that they're the first drives I've ever seen that could be described as handsome at all. I'd feel guilty stashing one of these behind my Wi-Fi router, which is what I do with my current external drive--they look like they were designed to sit on a coffee table.
The company even fussed over the zipper pull on the little case for its pocket drive, designing a unique and stylish one that matches the Seagate look and feel.
New Seagate advertising, which bears a vague resemblance to Apple's iPod ads, shows hip people surrounded by "digital auras" made up of the type of stuff that folks store on hard disks. The company presented me with a lavish brochure, illustrated with photos of Seagate employees, that includes what must be some of the most stirring ad copy ever written about rotating storage devices ("Certain things define who we are. The movies, music, books, art, and people we love. These passions make up our identity. And when we are without them we are less than ourselves.")
Oh, and Seagate has a new slogan: "Your On." That's not a typo--it's an intentional grammatical faux pas in the tradition of Apple's "Think Different." So far, it's baffled everyone I've told about it.
But wait, there's more. Maxtor, the hard drive company acquired by Seagate last year, has a new brand identity itself. When you flip around the Seagate brochure I got, it becomes a moving, slightly scary paean to the Maxtor mission. ("We are nothing more than the sum of our experiences. These are our lives. Everything we capture, share and create adds to us. And anything lost takes a piece of us with it...")
Maxtor's new slogan is the relatively straightforward, grammatically impeccable "Save Your Life," and its new industrial designs will have a vault-like quality. The bottom line is that Seagate's going to be marketed as a brand about keeping your stuff with you, while Maxtor will be promoted as one that's about protecting your stuff from data disaster.
All of this is certainly the most ambitious hard-drive marketing since the golden age of Iomega's ads for its Zip drive (which had a lot in common with Seagate's new push, including a large emotional component and the use of non sequiturs).
Part of me keeps coming back to the fact that the Seagate and Maxtor products are in fact more alike than different--and not radically different than they were before this marketing reboot, although the Seagate drives I saw sure looked nicer--and therefore marketing that communicates vivid but different things about the two brands is, ultimately...well, marketing. But the ads are fun and quirky, and I'd rather see a company lavish attention on industrial design than crank out anonymous-looking, clunky boxes. (The computer industry has more than enough of those, and probably always will.)
And hey, Seagate's CES news also included one move that's all substance, no hype: It's extended the limited warranties on its products from three years to five years.
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To paraphrase Allen Iverson, late of the Philadelphia 76er's Basketball team: "We're talkin' 'bout HARD DRIVES..." This seems much ado about nothing. Hard drives, nothing more or nothing less. Seems to me I'd rather see a company "...lavish attention..." on making sure it's products WORKED; after all we are "talking" about Hard Drives.
This seems like a non-starter. Non-geeks generally don't know whats in their computers, much less buy new hardware. They just buy the whole thing at once. Geeks on the other hand wouldn't be likely to fall for this marketing buzz. They allready know what hard drives do.
The only possible demographic these ads may work on is borderline geeks; geeky enough to upgrade their computers, but not geeky enough to understand anything beyond hard disk capacity and MAYBE rotation speeds.