Carter and his team studied successful consumer marketing techniques and examined tactics used by well-known companies supplying a component or ingredient of a finished product, like NutraSweet™, Teflon™ and Dolby™. They also began a variety of marketing experiments and soon began envisioning how a branded ingredient program would play out in the computer industry.

Key to this strategy was gaining consumer's confidence in Intel as a brand and demonstrating the value of buying a microprocessor from the industry's leading company, the pioneer of the microprocessor. At the suggestion of its advertising agency, Dahlin Smith and White, Intel adopted a new tag line for their advertising: "Intel. The computer inside." Using this to position the important role of the processor and at the same time associating Intel with "safety," "leading technology" and "reliability," the company's following-and consumer confidence-would hopefully soar. That would create a new "pull" for Intel-based PCs. Later, this tagline was shortened to "Intel Inside."

The important role of the microprocessor was being communicated, but to be truly effective the ingredient status of the microprocessor needed to be dealt with. In 1991 Carter launched the Intel Inside® coop marketing program. The heart of the program was an incentive-based cooperative advertising program. Intel would create a co-op fund where it would take a percentage of the purchase price of processors and put it in a pool for advertising funds. Available to all computer makers, it offered to cooperatively share advertising costs for PC print ads that included the Intel logo. The benefits were clear. Adding the Intel logo not only made the OEM's advertising dollar stretch farther, but it also conveyed an assurance that their systems were powered by the latest technology. The program launched in July 1991. By the end of that year, 300 PC OEMs had signed on to support the program.

After the OEM program was underway, Intel started print advertising around the world to explain the logo to consumers. In early 1992, made by George Lucas' Industrial Light Magic, Intel debuted its first TV advertising stressing speed, power and affordability. It used state-of-the-art special effects to take viewers on a sweeping trip through the innards of the personal computer before hovering over the campaign's raison d'être - the then new Intel i486™ processor.

Television was especially effective in communicating the Intel Inside® program messages to the consumer. Along with colorful TV advertisements, Intel added a distinctive and memorable three-second animated jingle (known as a signature ID audio visual logo), displaying the logo and playing a five-tone melody. Starting in 1995, the now-familiar tone helped cement a positive Intel image in the minds of millions of consumers.

The marketing investments were beginning to pay-off in terms of consumer mind-share, aided by the high-profile launches of the Pentium® (1993) and Pentium® Pro (1994) microprocessors. The advertising results were stunning. Dennis Carter comments, "I believe that there has been a lot more (industry wide) advertising because of the Intel Inside® program than there would have been otherwise. That has helped to create more PC demand. If you believe that advertising works, then more people are getting educated about the benefits of the PC because of the Intel Inside® program."

By the late 1990s the program was widely regarded as a success. Intel's innovative marketing helped broaden awareness of the PC, fueling consumer demand while prices continued to plunge. This paved the way for the PC to become more commonplace in the home, emerging as a business, entertainment and education tool. Intel became a lightning rod for this electronics revolution. When Intel's "Bunny People"™ characters danced their way across the TV screen, during a break of the 1997 SuperBowl, "they became nothing less than the whimsical icons of a go-go PC industry," according to Advertising Age. After six years, and almost two decades in the PC business, Intel had arrived in the public consciousness as a world-class player. Its brand was known worldwide, its name synonymous with the computer industry.

While the Intel Inside® Program continues to evolve, it will remain true to its heritage of promoting: "technology leadership," "quality" and "reliability." These features will be as important to online users and high-end server buyers today as they were to the desktop computer buyer in the 1990s