Creative finally learnt some branding lesson. Their branding is almost terrible. They have products like:
- ZEN Vision W
- ZEN Vision
- ZEN Vision:M
- ZEN V Plus
- ZEN V
- ZEN Stone Plus
- ZEN Stone
- ZEN Wav
- ZEN Neeon 2
- ZEN Neeon 512MB/ 1GB/ 2GB
- ZEN Neeon 5GB/ 6GB
- ZEN MicroPhoto
- ZEN Nano Plus
Looking at all these names make me giddy, I don’t feel zen at all.
“Dad I want a Zen.”
“Oh, is it the Vision W or the Vision or the Vision: M?”
Perhaps this branding confusion is due to Creative being unsure what sort of what products consumers really want. They throw out like 10 designs and just bet that one of them should be favorable among the consumers. Creative ZEN Whatever should be just Creative ZEN.
(Above is the Creative Zen, not Zen Whatever, just Zen this time. Good start for Creative.)
They can learn a lot from Apple. Apple tries to make their product line simple, they timed their releases properly so that essentially there’s 3 range of iPod to cater to different crowds. Creative have like 5 in the market each time and they throw out cryptic names. Apple’s iPod is just iPod Shuffle and the 2 other iPods using flash and hard disk. Apple manages to sell tons more than Creative. While it is generally true that Creative has worse design than Apple, Creative really should shake things up in their marketing and branding department a little. Get some guys fired, get new ones hired.
Possibly related:
Ahh.. yet another reason why Creative products don’t sell well.
The other known reasons is that Creative’s marketing strategy is known to suck. But it can’t beat the hype surrounding all these i-products that Apple is marketing. Not that it’s any superior at all to Creative’s products according to those guys at CNET who does the evaluation.
by xizor2000 (Aug 29, 2007 at 5 PM)It’s still more cool to hold an Apple product, the design is better than Creative’s. They need some work there too but I think it’s improving generally. I’m especially fond of slim electronics so to please me you just need to make your electronics slimmer. I bought a Samsung U600 just because I like that it’s slim and it just looks so pretty.
by Mr. Dew (Aug 30, 2007 at 2 AM)they will come out with zen 1.0 a month after launching this.
i just have this gut feeling.
creative is never stable with their launches. fickle mined.
by malique (Aug 30, 2007 at 3 AM)I just ordered the cheaper 2GB Zen at creative.com for only $79.99 US (less than hundred bucks even with taxes). 2GB is fine for me as I have many 1,2,4 and a couple of 8GB SD cards that I can use with it and have seperate cards for music/videos/photos/etc.
I can’t wait to get it as I have heard many good things from friends. I hope it plays my Divx TV episodes that vary in sizing (w/h), Creative website only says that Divx and Xvid is supported if larger then the screen (320 x 240 resolution).
by Photo Tricks (Dec 27, 2007 at 3 PM)I love my Zen. I do understand Branding sucks and all that.. but yuh.. i love it!
by Jessica Abraham (May 24, 2008 at 8 AM)