As we write this, someone somewhere is chowing down a piece of virtual birthday cake to celebrate Cisco’s first year in Second Life. The birthday coincides with Cisco’s second year attending the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, rubbing shoulders with consumer giants Sony, Panasonic and Nokia. Cisco desperately wants to be recognized as a consumer brand and is leveraging the name recognition of its purchases Linksys and Scientific-Atlanta to help it achieve that goal. Cisco is launching a range of products made by its acquisitions at the show. But Charles Golvin, an analyst with Forrester Research quoted in The San Francisco Chronicle says Cisco shouldn’t get too hung up using the more recognizable brands of its acquisitions to build up its name among the masses.
According to the story in the Chronicle:
“Cisco is not a recognized consumer brand; no one will confuse them with Sony or Apple. But their strength is how they make networking work,” Golvin said. Focusing on that, he said, “allows Cisco to extend its brand across not only devices but reinforces that they are the brand behind these new connected devices.”
That of course is easier said than done. A lot of it has to do with a change of culture in Cisco and it appears that Ken Wirt, Cisco’s new VP of consumer marketing has a huge job on his hands.
A case in point is this rather pointless video up on the Cisco Consumer Experience blog of Cisco staffers setting up the Cisco hospitality suite at some hotel in Vegas. Actually you don’t really see many people setting stuff up, just what looks like a lone cameraman wondering around a few empty rooms. Couldn’t imagine some hot shot marketing guy in Sony letting this video go out to the public somehow.
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