For a vivid demonstration of the power of the brand, look no further than Sun Microsystems.
The company nearly doubled its advertising expenditures between 1995 and 1997, from US$152 million to $272 million, mostly to promote a reconstituted and renamed programming language that had begun development years earlier. The freshly re-minted language, Java, was hip. It was a panacea for boring Web sites. It could be written once and run anywhere! Sun spent lavishly to splash the Java logo - a steaming cuppa joe - throughout magazines and newspapers. Then the company purchased huge chunks of airtime to talk about the merits of a product that listeners couldn't actually go out and buy.
The result of this intense bout of brand-building? A tripling of Sun's Wall Street worth, not to mention the creation of a Java developers community that's estimated at half a million coders strong.
"Brands are about establishing an advantage," says George Paolini, director of corporate marketing for Sun's JavaSoft division. "The technology world is becoming increasingly more commoditized - what's the distinction between this browser or that word processor, or that search engine? And the more things become commoditized, the more important brands become."
Sun's longtime hope has been that Java's luster will rub off on the company's high-margin line of hardware products, and that the core attributes of the Java brand - which Paolini glowingly describes as "new, hip, the promise of the future" - will ideally transfer to Sun as a company.
Roadblocks to the rosy future
Has Sun's marketing blitz raised expectations about Java that can't possibly be met? And will the spat between Sun and Microsoft warp the Java marketing message into counterproductive "us-against-them" propaganda?
While the analysts who follow Sun's stock don't attribute the company's revenue growth (from $5.9 billion in 1995 to $8.5 billion in 1997) entirely to Java, they view the brand as a catalyst that has helped spark sales. "The brand association [between Sun and Java] has definitely helped them win accounts," says Amit Chopra of Credit Suisse First Boston. "But they can easily lose that brand association if they don't stay out front."
That's the challenge: Can Java licensees like IBM and Oracle and Netscape join in the marketing frenzy without eroding Sun's claim to paternity? And now that the International Standards Organization has blessed Java, can it be both a standard and Sun's baby?
IBM, for one, seems to think the licensees already own a piece of the Java brand. "[Sun] needs to recognize the contributions that IBM, Netscape, and Oracle are making," says David Gee, the program director of Java marketing at Big Blue. "Without us, there would be no 80 million desktops that are using Java today, and no Java in the enterprise."
Sun's hired marketing guns at San Francisco ad agency Lowe & Partners are doing everything they can to hold onto the Java brand. "History is just riddled with brands that have been lost to the public domain because the owner didn't step back and say, 'We are the stewards of this brand,'" says Michel Sergio, a senior vice president at Lowe who manages the Sun account.
Jolted by the hype
Many observers say that Sun has been lax in its stewardship thus far, mostly as a result of Java's meteoric rise. "I do think it took Sun by surprise how big the brand got," says branding consultant Susan Russell of the Russell Mark Group. "They didn't expect it."
So while many ads over the past year put Java in the spotlight and left Sun offstage, Lowe's 1998 marketing push - which involves newspapers, magazines, television, and outdoor advertising - will make sure that people connect the two together. "Java is being integrated into Sun's advertising," says Sergio.
But there's still tension between Java the brand and Java the standard - tension that Lowe & Partners' director of strategic planning Michael Breen alludes to when he says, "We want to continue to build the association between Sun and Java, but we don't want to be proprietary about it."
That will be a tough balancing act. "Sun is losing the Java brand in the marketplace of ideas," says Forrester analyst Ted Schadler. "Everybody sees the value of Java, and has adopted it for their own purposes. Java the brand got out of hand very quickly, and eventually it will go away."
But others say it doesn't matter if Sun loses its grip on Java the brand. "Even if Java becomes generic, anything that diminishes the impact of Microsoft as a standard would be to the benefit of Sun and a lot of other companies," says Steve Dube, an analyst at Wasserstein Perella.
There's also the question of whether Sun has over-promoted Java - to the point where the technology can't meet expectations. Says IBM's Gee: "Sun has marketed Java as all things to all people. And what has happened is that the hype has gotten ahead of the here."
When the brew sours
Some see the potential for a Java backlash. "The marketing blitz may have come a bit too early," says John Magee, the director of consulting services at Natural Intelligence, a Cambridge, Massachusetts, Java developer. "People are going to start saying, 'What was the big deal about Java?' And with you media people, Java either has to be the second coming, or dead as a doornail." But Magee emphasizes that he's questioning only the public perceptions about Java - not developers' support, which he views as solid.
Even George Paolini at JavaSoft acknowledges that Java - and all new technologies - require a marketing jump start, even before they're ready for prime time. "In today's world, it's really about first creating mindshare and awareness about a technology, and then driving that technology to reality. That's really what Java has been about," Paolini says.
Lately, though, Java has been deployed as a weapon in the battles between Sun and Microsoft - and that may be damaging to the company's brand-building efforts. "It has become a bit juvenile," says Ted Young, chief technology officer at Advanced Web Technologies, a Java training company in New York. "Stop bashing each other and focus on making it a better product and telling people about it." And Zona Research's Ron Rappaport says that in order for Java to grow, Sun has to stop playing the "us-against-them card."
As Sun continues to pour money into marketing - most recently, painting Java jingoism on the sides of buildings in New York, Dallas, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon - it's also looking to the future. Just as Intel convinced consumers to care about the microprocessor that runs their PCs, Sun hopes to make them demand "100 percent pure Java" devices and applications. "They envision a day when you can go to Circuit City and buy Java products," says Marty Cagan, Netscape's vice president for platform and tools. "They're trying hard to really make people worldwide understand the benefits of Java."
"It's a long-term investment," says Susan Fournier, a professor at Harvard Business School. "Now, we look back at 'Intel Inside' and say, 'Wow, how smart.' Intel was basically teaching people how to buy a computer: Buy the chip. And they fundamentally changed consumer behavior. Sun is placing the same bet - by teaching people to think about the inherent capabilities of the software, they can be developing those people as future consumers."
Will it work? "I've been astonished by [Sun's] audacity," says Vince Thomas, who runs Intel's consumer-marketing programs. "But it's no more audacious than trying to brand a chip."
Whether Sun can sustain the Java brand until the day a consumer can go out and buy a Java toaster, running Java software, is another question entirely. Holding onto a brand even as it becomes a standard is a trick few technology companies have been able to master. And some wonder whether much of Java's success so far isn't just a function of timing.
"There are certain inflection points in the evolution of technology when one vendor's product, technology, or vision just clicks," says Rappaport. "Sun stepped in at the right point with Java. As did Netscape. As did Apple. The question is: Can they keep the momentum going?"
