So much for the datasheet: how do customers feel about your semiconductor product?
There is a reason that video adverts promoting cars have a common theme: a happy driver, gliding along an empty road, travelling towards some desirable destination – a beauty spot, a dramatic clifftop, home. Car makers, through years of experience, have discovered that the most important thing for them to achieve in the precious few seconds that they have the viewer’s attention is to make them feel good about what the car means to them: making them feel a sense of excitement, or adventure, or indulgence, or safety.
Of course, consumers do not work on emotion alone. A car is a considered purchase – most buyers carefully study features and specifications, and take a test drive before they actually make a purchase. But the buyer journey starts with an emotion. And this is why car ads are all about feelings.
Watching a stream of car ads at the movie theatre recently (before a screening of Hamnet: the emotions run really high in that film!), I reflected on emotion in semiconductor product advertising. In the car industry, the use of emotional triggers is part of the culture – it’s just what you do if you are a marketing executive in the automotive sector.
Not so much in the semiconductor industry.
A random but not obviously unrepresentative journey through the websites of three big and famous US-based chip makers reveals a largely emotion-free approach to product advertising. The home page of all three features in prime position – the first element the visitor sees – revolving banners which include product promotions. Given their prime position, we should assume that the company views these products as its most important and attractive, and deserving of the most powerful advertising appeal.
What all three companies avoid doing, however, is appealing to the emotions of the design engineers and system architects who will decide whether the product gets into their bill-of-materials.
Here is a sample of the headlines that these three giants put in pride of place on their home page (anonymised for discretion’s sake):
‘Introducing the [product name] – redefining what’s possible at the intelligent edge’
‘Delivering high-performance AI MCUs – empower your IoT solutions with the [product name]’
‘Up to 50x better performance per watt for AI with [product name]’
‘Smarter process automation with [product name] – higher data throughput, simpler installation, and real-time diagnostics boost reliability and efficiency’
Design engineers and system architects are swayed by emotion when they start the process of buying a car. So might not semiconductor companies use the power of emotion to sway engineers’ decisions about which new semiconductor products to consider?
Headlines could look something like this:
To evoke the feeling of mastery: ‘Square the power/performance circle in edge AI devices with [product name]’
Or the feeling of adventure: ‘Discover how [product name] opens up new paths to autonomous intelligence at the edge’
The feeling of security: ‘Enjoy peace of mind with the reliability provided by [product name’s] real-time diagnostics’
The feeling of victory: ‘Win the race to microwatt-level AI with [product name’s] 50x lower power consumption’
It’s a simple tweak – but competition for attention in today’s semiconductor market is brutal. If you have managed to get a visitor to your home page, you want them to do something valuable, such as add your hot new product to their list of candidates for evaluation.
I have a feeling that there is something for the semiconductor industry to learn from car makers. It just might be worth trying an appeal to the design engineer’s heart as well as their head.