'PC Does What' Campaign Isn't About PCs

Using catch phrases as a sales tool is very difficult. Probably the closest anyone got was the idiotic "Wassup" campaign from Budweiser. The annoyance factor had a lot to do with its success.

Broadcasters love to find catch phrases for various shows. "You're the weakest link, goodbye!" and "You're fired!" both come to mind. But with product marketing, it's a little tougher. Nobody is really saying "Zoom-Zoom" like on the Mazda commercial, but it gets your attention. One of the best catch phrase campaigns was "Dude, you're getting a Dell," which was dropped because the "Dell dude" got busted for pot.

When given a choice, smart marketers will chose a catchy jingle rather than a catch phrase. Intel has a variation on this with the brief musical ditty at the end of its commercials, while some jingles may be the name of the product set to music (Sega yelled SEGA! or Play-Sta-Shon).

But not everyone teams up with smart marketers. So Dell, Lenovo, HP, and Intel have jointly developed a series of very lame TV spots using the catch phrase "PC does what?" The most annoying aspect of the campaign is that they are not promoting a particular PC but laptops in general.

The campaign should have been "Laptop does what?" As the TV spots show, a laptop can become a tablet and can play music. A laptop can play high-res games. A laptop can be thin enough to slide under a door. A laptop can become a tablet again. A laptop can have an edge-to-edge display.

Who needs to slip a laptop into a room under a door?

Again, these are not PCs by any standard definition—most people would think of a desktop. These are laptops OR notebooks and should be marketed as such. But I'm guessing that's old-fashioned.

These companies are pulling an old trick to redefine things so their numbers look better. If a notebook computer, or a tablet is called a PC then it changes the way you talk about numbers. Who needs an image that PC sales are forever slipping? Pretty soon the mobile smartphone will be called a PC. 

So what is it that I am typing this column on? A loaded tower machine and a couple of 27-inch monitors. Lots of things hang off the device. This can no longer be a PC. I should give up saying it is a PC or advising people to buy these items. It's a workstation.

The movement to redefine the desktop computer to "workstation" began when the minicomputer companies such as Sun Microsystems were selling desktop computers but calling them workstations to get more money.

This type of computing is powerful but not mobile. It stays put. That's bad and must be condemned. It's fine if people really think that doing everything on a laptop realizes some sort of freedom; good for them. The market is clearly going in that direction, hence the stagnation insofar as desktop computing is concerned.

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But I suggest that if they wanted to really promote a real PC with the catch phrase "PC does what?" how about doing it right. And show a real PC.

Some suggestions.

• PC-based movie editing bay piecing together a feature length film. PC does what?
• Wall Street trader using four screens to match markets for some tricky money making arbitrage. PC Does what?
• Autodesk running on a powerful PC designing a 100-story building in great detail. PC does what?

I could go on. But let's get real be honest and say what you mean. "Laptop does what?"

Then, come up with something better than the fact that the keyboard can be flipped around.